RTX 3080 and 3090 shortages likely to last until 2021

Jensen Huang, Nvidia CEO, has spoken out about the ongoing shortages of RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 parts, saying, ‘I believe that demand will outstrip all of our supply through the year.’

The news will no doubt come as a blow to anyone looking to pick up an RTX 30 Series card in time for Christmas. As reported by Tom’s Hardware, a Q&A session for press that was supposed to be covering Nvidia’s GTC announcements (including the RTX A6000 and RTX A40 non-Quadro Quadro replacements) was inevitably sidetracked into the hot topic i.e. the near-impossibility of actually buying an RTX 3080 or RTX 3090.

Following his prediction about supply shortages lasting until at least 2021, Huang also added, ‘The 3080 and 3090 have a demand issue, not a supply issue. The demand issue is that it is much, much greater than we expected — and we expected really a lot.’

‘Retailers will tell you they haven't seen a phenomenon like this in over a decade of computing. It hearkens back to the old days of Windows 95 and Pentium when people were just out of their minds to buy this stuff. So this is a phenomenon like we've not seen in a long time, and we just weren't prepared for it.

‘Even if we knew about all the demand, I don't think it's possible to have ramped that fast. We're ramping really, really hard. Yields are great, the product's shipping fantastically, it's just getting sold out instantly,’ said Huang. ‘I appreciate it very much, I just don't think there's a real problem to solve. It's a phenomenon to observe. It's just a phenomenon.’

No official comment was made about the RTX 3070, which has just been pushed back by two weeks in order to help solve the real problem observe the phenomenon of insufficient supply. Given that it’s going to bring Ampere down to $499 and is touted as having RTX 2080 Ti levels of performance, though, it’s reasonable to expect demand to be in excess of the more expensive cards, potentially leaving even more wannabe Ampere owners out of luck.

If that's you, at least you can rest easy knowing Huang appreciates it.