NVIDIA CEO Talks about GPU Supply Constraints and Cryptocurrency
17 Mar 2015 --- Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO of Nvidia Corp., gives a keynote presentation during the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. Huang later unveiled the Titan X CPU operating with a GeForce GTX Titan X graphics card during the presentation. --- Image by © Kim Kulish/Corbis
Recent cryptocurrency boom has left the PC gaming community severely frustrated over sky-high prices of graphics cards, be it from Nvidia or AMD; if it’s $250 or above, it’s likely selling for insane prices thanks to miners eating up stock on entire store shelves. Nvidia wants you to know they are working to bring supply up to demand.
In recent earnings call (via Wccftech), CEO Jen Hsun Huang talked about the company’s efforts to tackle the challenge of keeping graphics cards in stock for its gaming audience. While Nvidia enjoyed a higher revenue this past quarter, the company is not banking on cryptocurrency miners as their focused customers.
“Strong demand in the cryptocurrency market exceeded our expectations. Cryptocurrency mining accounted for a higher percentage of revenue than the previous quarter. Keep in mind that’s very difficult for us to quantify down to the end customers view. Our main focus remains on our core market, as cryptocurrency will likely remain volatile.” – Colette Kress, Chief Financial Officer
Cryptocurrency miners have the tendency to opt out of the program if they fear a market crash, loyalty to a brand is not a concept true to them – something that’s not viable for long-term success. It’s clear that Nvidia feels that way too.
Nvidia previously had tried to instruct its distributors to prioritize selling stock to gamers over miners. On the absurdly high prices right now, Jen Hsun Huang said that Nvidia does not set what prices its channel partners sell their stuff for and the best way to tackle the challenge is “work and supply”. “The demand is great and it’s very likely the demand will remain great as we look through this quarter”, he added.
“And so, we just have to keep working on increasingly supply. We have our suppliers who are the worlds best and largest semiconductor manufacturers in the world and they’re responding correctly and I’m really grateful for everything they are doing, we got to do a catch up to that demand, which as such is really great.”
We’re just constrained. Obviously, we’re ten times larger of a GPU supplier than the competition and so we have a lot more suppliers supporting us and a lot more distributors taking approach to market and lot more partners distributing our products all over the world. And so, I don’t know how to explain this right from demand is just really great. And so we just got to keep our nose to it and catch up the demand.
The right situation right now is that if you are in the market to buy build a gaming PC or buy a graphics card then your only option is a GTX 1050, or anything below that. It’s a terrible time to be a PC gamer shopping for parts right now. In the current climate, any efforts from manufacturers such as Nvidia is the only way to score one’s desired graphic card at a decent price.
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