Nvidia says it built too many GPUs — expect sales while it works on something ‘new’
PC sales abruptly tanked this quarter, so Nvidia, like Intel, is suddenly under the gun. What are you going to do about the billions of dollars of growth that just went up in smoke, investors tend to ask! But while that’s an annoying situation for Nvidia during today’s Q2 earnings, it’s an intriguing one for gamers like you and me — because Nvidia tried to placate those investors by revealing that exciting things may be on the way.
First: discounts! Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang confirmed what we’ve suspected for months: Nvidia actually built too many gaming GPUs and is now being forced to sell them for less money. “We found ourselves with excess inventory,” says Huang. “Our strategy is to sell-in well below the current sell-through levels in the marketplace to give the channel an opportunity to correct.”
“We’ve implemented programs with our partners to price-position the product in the channel in preparation for our next generation,” he also said on the call.
Here’s what that sounds like to me: In order to sell as many RTX 3000 graphics cards and chips as it can before the RTX 4000 series begins to arrive this fall, it’s cutting prices — to distributors anyhow.
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That doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll see a too-good-to-be-true price on a graphics card or gaming laptop right away, because the final price is up to partners and retailers — but those parties have their own incentives to clear shelves, even if they disguise them as sales rather than across-the-board price cuts. Either way, the trend we’re seeing is absolutely down, with some cards once again appearing at MSRP after years of commanding 2-3x their price on eBay.
Nvidia is also trying to signal that the current-gen Ampere GPUs will live alongside next-gen
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