In the recent GTC 2020 fall conference by NVIDIA, CEO Jensen Huang was asked by during a Q&A session about the persisting shortages of the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090. Huang responded on the matter by stating that “The 3080 and 3090 have a demand issue, not a supply issue.” He added that “The demand issue is that it is much much greater than we expected -and we expected really a lot.”
Jensen Huang predicts that the year end holidays of 2020 that usually drives consumer spending will only make the matter worse for supplies:
“I believe that demand will outstrip all of our supply through the year. Remember, we’re also going into the double-whammy. The double-whammy is the holiday season. Even before the holiday season, we were doing incredibly well, and then you add on top of it the “Ampere factor,” and then you add on top of that the “Ampere holiday factor,” and we’re going to have a really really big Q4 season.”
Jensen adds that this is similar to the 90s Pentium demand.
“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.”p