There are about 7 or so reasons for today's (not so) great graphics card shortage, which all add up to create this huge supply issue - so I'll simplify it for you right here and now!
1. The Consumer
People are buying over-priced resale cards on places like E-bay - this only encourages scalpers more and more to continue upping the price. You can help all gamers by just waiting for a while longer!
2. Raw Materials
Steel, carbon, plastic, silicon and cardboard are all short in supply. This is mainly because of the gigantic demand during the Winter of 2020.
3. Demand
Demand is high, but supply is low. Nvidea for example, who normally prepare stock a year or so in advance were not expecting a huge leap like this in 2020 and 2021 in graphics card buyers!
4. Brexit and Tarrifs
Tarrifs on goods to America and new Brexit rules & regulations on goods to the UK from China have caused delays and supply issues.
5. Scalpers & Miners
With a surge in the value of crypto currencies like dogecoin, bitcoin and ethereum, people have bulk bought graphics card to mine this cryto. As well as this, scalpers have taken advantage of the resale market on E-bay for GPUs and have also bought in bulk using bots before the normal consumer can!
6. Covid-19
Many factories producing the chips for these GPUs have been shut for many months, and even now are still not running at 100% capacity and likely won't be for another few months.
7. Shipping
The UK and Ireland are some of the furthest places for the boats to get to. For a ship to find a free space in a harbour is one thing but to get a shipping container is another. A container used to cost around 1500 Dollars (USD) but now each one could be anywhere between 12,000 to 14,000 Dollars (USD). So the price of each product in the container will have to raise to make up for the difference!
Conclusion:
We've been in this crypto crisis before but we've bounced back from a mining craze like this, don't worry about that. It is expected we may see some GPUs returning by late summer 2021 when there is less demand and people are outside so China and Taiwan can play catch up. But until then why not get prepared for the return or GPUs and buy a Serval Tech PC!
Writer - Daniel O'Connor
