Nvidia RTX 40 series GPUs impacted by supply shortage: Leak

Reports indicate that Nvidia has narrowed the supply for the RTX 40 series of GPUs in order to focus on AI chips.

Some supply chain sources are reporting that Nvidia RTX 40 ‘Lovelace’ graphics cards might see a market shortage as early as August. Reports from Nvidia partners indicate that the supply of some SKUs may have dropped by as much as 50%.

Reports are conflicted over the cause of this supply shortage. Media outlets in Taiwan have stated that Nvidia is moving its focus to the manufacture of AI chips.

Nvidia has been one of the main beneficiaries of the AI boom, becoming one of the primary hardware providers for AI companies such as OpenAI.

Suppliers like TSMC are said to have shifted their production facilities over to AI chip manufacturing. This has left little room for the production of consumer-grade GPUs like the GeForce RTX 4060 and RTX 4070.

On the other hand, a poster on BoardChannels, a forum used for Nvidia’s official partners, claims that the shortages are related to a memory supply problem.

Twitter/X user Harukaze5719 found the post on BoardChannels. It described a situation where Nvidia had seen a drop in the supply of GDDR6X memory modules from memory manufacturers.

The report specifies ‘quality control problems’ with a batch of GDDR6X memory. This allegedly created a bottleneck in the supply chain, which disrupted production. However, the report says this issue is a short-term problem that can be rapidly resolved.

UDN, another Nvidia supplier, has pointed to an intentional reduction in supply. This is to avoid excessive inventory as Nvidia gears up for the next generation RTX 50 ‘Blackwell’ cards. However, this intentional downsizing of stock has driven up prices for existing cards, particularly affecting the RTX 4060 and RTX 4070.