NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50-series Blackwell Availability

I don't think that there is any indication of a supply problem for anyone yet, only the demand "problem" - and in case of Nvidia the weird decision to EOL 40 series well before the launch of 50 SKUs.

We already saw the results of that in their latest quarterly report where gaming revenue Y/Y fell prior to 50 series launch and we'll see how that launch supply is looking in the next report.
 
pcchen said:
This leads to another theory on the possibility of an earthquake early this year causing some disruptions in some TSMC's fabs
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The earthquake happened in Jan 21st, NVIDIA should have been stockpiling chips for desktop and laptop for months by then (at least since September), but that obviously didn't happen, which is why I think the earthquake theory is most likely inaccurate.
 
DegustatoR said:
I don't think that there is any indication of a supply problem for anyone yet, only the demand "problem" - and in case of Nvidia the weird decision to EOL 40 series well before the launch of 50 SKUs.

We already saw the results of that in their latest quarterly report where gaming revenue Y/Y fell prior to 50 series launch and we'll see how that launch supply is looking in the next report.
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I'm not sure about this. Even the larger internet retailers here don't have many cards, not just high end cards such as 5090 and 5080, but even 5070 are in short supply (a few hundreds in the first batch and trickle amounts later), and AMD's 9070 and 9070 XT are in the same situation. I don't think the demand is this high at this particular time.
 
DavidGraham said:
The earthquake happened in Jan 21st, NVIDIA should have been stockpiling chips for desktop and laptop for months by then (at least since September), but that obviously didn't happen, which is why I think the earthquake theory is most likely inaccurate.
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I don't think they are contradictory. If NVIDIA had been stockpiling chips last year, we shouldn't be seeing such small supplies now. On the other hand, if for any reason they couldn't (e.g. there's some problems in the early batch or something like that) and have to delay the production into, say, November last year, the earthquake could very possibly disrupt their supplies.
 
pcchen said:
I'm not sure about this. Even the larger internet retailers here don't have many cards, not just high end cards such as 5090 and 5080, but even 5070 are in short supply (a few hundreds in the first batch and trickle amounts later), and AMD's 9070 and 9070 XT are in the same situation. I don't think the demand is this high at this particular time.
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Retailers not having many cards sitting on shelves don't tell us much about supply aside from the fact that it's not enough to fulfill the current demand.
The demand which is a) always high at pretty much any new generation of GPUs launch and b) has been building up for ~2 months on the Nvidia side (which is/was ~90% of the market so basically for everyone).
In this scenario it's not surprising to see GPUs still selling out everywhere for the second month since launch, and it doesn't necessarily mean that the current supply is the issue.
 
DegustatoR said:
I don't think that there is any indication of a supply problem for anyone yet, only the demand "problem" - and in case of Nvidia the weird decision to EOL 40 series well before the launch of 50 SKUs.
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I mean that is a supply problem as far as I'm concerned. Being short on supply for brand new cards isn't weird, but the old ones going EOL months before the new ones launch is weird and only exacerbates the expected low availability of the new models.

On another note, I'd like to build a 100billion dollar factory. Can anyone recommend some good earthquake zones? The Pacific Ring of Fire looks promising.
 
pcchen said:
On the other hand, if for any reason they couldn't (e.g. there's some problems in the early batch or something like that)
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A problem we heard nothing about? I mean we already heard about problems for server chips (as early as July last year), but we heard nothing about consumer chips.
DegustatoR said:
In this scenario it's not surprising to see GPUs still selling out everywhere for the second month since launch, and it doesn't necessarily mean that the current supply is the issue.
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It doesn't because retailers are all complaining of the severe lack of any RTX 50 supply, which became quite obvious even compared to the relatively limited AMD's RDNA4 supply, and laptop makers were notified of at least a 2 months delay of laptop chips, restocks are also taking way longer than before. The problem is quite pervasive across the whole field.
 
DavidGraham said:
A problem we heard nothing about? I mean we already heard about problems for server chips (as early as July last year), but we heard nothing about consumer chips.
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That's just a possibility. Obviously NVIDIA didn't start production in September as you said for whatever reason, otherwise there wouldn't be a supply issue. As I asid, if the production started as late as November, the earthquake could destroy some of the wafers as a production pipeline can be up to 3 months, so I don't think one can definitely rule out the possibility of a disruption caused by the earthquake.
 
My bet is that it’s all of the above. Blackwell datacenter is confirmed to have issues. Blackwell consumer is confirmed to have issues. It’s a reasonable guess that consumer wafers were also sacrificed to help ramp DC. And then there’s the earthquake, Chinese new year etc. It’s a perfect storm for low supply.
 
According to NVIDIA they've in fact shipped more RTX 50's than RTX 40's in same timeframe after launch since day 0. Where on earth all these GPUs ended up remains a mystery, since retailers definitely don't agree with the numbers.

1741871269767.png
 
Kaotik said:
According to NVIDIA they've in fact shipped more RTX 50's than RTX 40's in same timeframe after launch since day 0. Where on earth all these GPUs ended up remains a mystery, since retailers definitely don't agree with the numbers.

View attachment 13303
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Probably China. It's becoming a bigger and bigger market with money. There's uncertainty about what Nvidia will be able to ship there in case a trade war escalates so might as well get what you can now.
 
Kaotik said:
Where on earth all these GPUs ended up remains a mystery
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Is it? The fact that there are no GPUs sitting on shelves in the US and EU doesn't tell us anything. I see quite a lot of people on forums with 50 series cards. Everything we have now is well into the anecdotal evidence category, only the financial results will provide anything solid on how many of these have actually been sold.

Edit: One thing to keep in mind when looking at shipment numbers is that 40 series launch happened during ETH mining crash and it is entirely possible that 40 series shipments were lower than usual as everyone was sitting on excess inventory back then. So shipments being 2X here isn't telling us much either.
 
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DegustatoR said:
Is it? The fact that there are no GPUs sitting on shelves in the US and EU doesn't tell us anything. I see quite a lot of people on forums with 50 series cards. Everything we have now is well into the anecdotal evidence category, only the financial results will provide anything solid on how many of these have actually been sold.
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No, it doesn't. But the fact that countless retailers complained and had low stock at launch (like OCUK having around 10 % of RTX 40 launch stock) does, despite NVIDIA claiming to have shipped more RTX 50's than RTX 40's since start.
 
The period that NVIDIA is looking at is five weeks. The 4090 was the only SKU in that period, versus 4 RTX 50 SKUs in the same period. NVIDIA is therefore comparing the supply of 1 model (4090) vs 4 models (5090, 5080, 5070Ti, 5070).

Edit: wrong theory.
 
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DavidGraham said:
The period that NVIDIA is looking at is five weeks. The 4090 was the only SKU in that period, versus 4 RTX 50 SKUs in the same period. NVIDIA is therefore comparing the supply of 1 model (4090) vs 4 models (5090, 5080, 5070Ti, 5070).
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This is a wrong suggestion. Shipments of products start quite a bit earlier than their date of going on sale. 4090 being the only product on sale during the first weeks of Lovelace cycle doesn't mean that other cards weren't shipping.
 
DegustatoR said:
This is a wrong suggestion. Shipments of products start quite a bit earlier than their date of going on sale. 4090 being the only product on sale during the first weeks of Lovelace cycle doesn't mean that other cards weren't shipping.
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You are right, I forgot about that.
 
Oh the joys of looking forward to paying only $2000 + tax for a GPU.

During a recent media pre-brief with NVIDIA, covering the company's latest GeForce RTX and AI announcements as GDC kicks off, we asked about MSRP pricing as a current issue and hot topic.

How is NVIDIA working with its partners to ensure that more affordable GeForce RTX 50 Series models will become available to consumers? "We are working closely with not just our AIB partners but also our retail partners to make sure that the supply is available at MSRP," NVIDIA's Justin Walker responds. "In the end, the best way to do that is is get more supply onto a shelf. As soon as the supply catches up to demand, we expect prices to stabilize."
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Kaotik said:
According to NVIDIA they've in fact shipped more RTX 50's than RTX 40's in same timeframe after launch since day 0. Where on earth all these GPUs ended up remains a mystery, since retailers definitely don't agree with the numbers.
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The devil is in the details here I'm guessing, but it's marketing's job to shrug off the details and focus on graphs and PR.

Blackwell release over 5 weeks includes 4 different models across a significant price range. Ada was only 4090 and 4080 with the 4080 released a month after the 4090.

But who cares, Nvidiaaaaaaaaaaaaa.
 
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