Lack of Geforce RTX 3000 cards may be due in part to crypto sales

The autumn of 2020 has been characterized by a lack of access to sought-after products, a trend that began with Nvidia’s graphics cards in the Geforce RTX 3000 series. With previous years’ launches of graphics cards, sales of graphics cards for cryptocurrency have been responsible for a temporary shortage of products in the trade, and mining seems to have played a role in the Geforce RTX 3000 as well.

This according to a report from financial analysts at RBC Capital Markets (via Bitcoin) who states that miningsales accounted for a significant portion of Nvidia’s strong revenue during the third quarter of the year. According to the analysis, crypto diggers have in recent months bought Geforce RTX 3000 cards worth USD 175 million, or approximately SEK 1.49 billion. Nvidia reports a 37 percent increase for Q3 2020, and mining-sales thus account for a significant part of this.

For the quarter in review, Nvidia sold at least $175 million worth of new generation GPUs to ethereum miners, helping the outperformance, according to a note from RBC Capital Markets analyst Mitch Steves. The analyst had guided sales to miners to come in at $150 million for the quarter.

Steves noted that the upcoming network upgrade of the Ethereum blockchain, also known as Ethereum 2.0, which is scheduled to take place sometime in December, demands that miners switch over to more efficient mining hardware. Nvidia’s new Ampere GPU chips are thought to meet that need.

Total sales in Gaming reach a total value of $ 2.27 billion, but this includes all gaming-related sales and it is not possible to ascertain exactly how much Geforce RTX 3000 “Ampere” accounts for. An estimate of $ 145 million divided by the price of the Geforce RTX 3080, which has been on the market the longest, shows that if Nvidia sold the RTX 3080 for $ 145 million, it means more graphics cards to miningpurpose than to “ordinary” consumers.

As it does not appear in Nvidia’s quarterly report exactly which Geforce models make up the sales, and that Barron’s analysis is only an estimate of how much of the cards are used for mining, such an estimate is too blunt to be a concrete analysis. What the analysis at least points out is that crypto-digging has been a contributing factor to the shortage of Ampere hardware.

One reason for the increased demand for Geforce RTX 3000 hardware is stated to be that the network technology behind the cryptocurrency Ethereum will be upgraded in December, and that the new version places higher demands on efficient mining-hardware. Increased pressure from crypto diggers thus exacerbates another problem that has plagued all launched models in the Geforce RTX 3000 series.

Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang has previously announced that limited access will continue until the beginning of 2021. It remains to be seen whether miningThe industry is also taking a hard line on AMD’s Radeon RX 6000 series, where the supply of graphics cards has been weaker than Nvidia’s newcomers. AMD is said to have dedicated graphics cards underway for just that mining, which if true can make it easier for those who want to get a Radeon RX 6000 card in the coming months.

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