Nvidia CFO: GPU Prices Should Start Stabilizing in 2H of 2022

There might be a sliver of light at the end of the “GPU prices are insane” tunnel, according to Nvidia’s CFO. Speaking at the UBS Global TMT conference on Monday, Colette Kress stated she thinks there’s relief in-sight, near the end of next year. Kress noted the company’s strong recent growth quarter-to-quarter and year-over-year, as it has been setting records each and every quarter as it sells every single GPU it makes for higher values than it did previously. This has allowed it to dump truckloads of cash into long-term agreements with its suppliers, stating this investment will allow the company to, “…be in a better situation in terms of supply when we look at the second half of next year.”

As detailed by PCMag, Kress thinks the solution to the current situation is simply more supply. As we reported previously, in its Q3 2021 earnings report, the company noted it will be spending $3.4 billion dollars in the coming months to shore up its supply chain far into the future, which will hopefully ease some of the strain it anticipates in the coming year. Speaking of its long-term commitments, Kress stated, “Longer-term can be more than a year,” she said, adding, “You’ve seen us now enter into agreements that will take us out many years in terms of long-term capacity needs.”

However, Kress also remarked that she’s not sure when the market will stabilize, meaning a time when there will be enough GPUs to meet demand. Obviously that’s a bit of a “crystal ball” scenario, as nobody seems to know when, or if, demand can ever be satiated again due to recent changes in the market. However, the graphics card industry in particular has proven to have insatiable demand over the past year, thanks to the pandemic and people buying GPUs to mine cryptocurrencies. This level of demand for mining seems to be infinite, much to the dismay of gamers the world over.

This line of thinking assumes there can theoretically be enough cards for everyone, just like in the olden days of late 2019, but that’s not entirely clear. Even if miners move onto other sources of income there’s still the fact that there are people whose full-time job it is to employ bots to acquire every GPU they can find as well, and they are making a killing due to the shortage of available GPUs. Between the bots and the miners, there’s not much inventory left for gamers, so it’s unknown at this time if there will ever be “enough” supply to satisfy everyone who wants a new graphics card.

“We’d love to bring that back down (the pricing),” said Kress. “We believe bringing that down really just takes providing a reasonable amount of supply in the market versus the lean amounts that we have today.”

To its credit, Nvidia did release Low Hash Rash versions of its RTX 30-series GPUs, but that has done little to make a dent in GPU availability. It’s also releasing the “old” RTX 2060 GPU as well, with the hopes that its relatively low hash rate will cause it to be ignored by miners, but initial reports indicate it is already selling out before it even launched (heavy sigh).