Comment by jmalicki
15 hours ago
NVidia is limited by the number of chips they can produce.
If you can fab 1000 chips, and can sell some for $500 and some for $80000 what are you going to do?
The game GPU is at once profitable, but causes them to give up far more profits than they're gaining from it.
They're maintaining the game market to have multiple markets and not go all in, but it's strategic hedging at this point. When NVidia makes a gaming GPU instead of a data center GPU they are leaving money on the table in the short term since they're constrained at the fab level.
This almost seems like we need a strategic reserve for semiconductors- kinda like we have it for food, to prevent suppliers from throwing it away when they are suddenly able to sell something much more lucrative.
The CHIPS Act in the US did set aside a reserve for older processes used for automobile, defense, and industrial semiconductors - but that's not gaming GPUs that used the previous process node.
Sure, semiconductors for important industrial uses are critical & I agree gaming GPUs are much less critical. Still RAM & storage multiplying in price over such a short ammount of time also can't be good for the economy & society, so some sort of strategtic reserve could help there as well.