ASUS blames Nvidia on declined Q1 GPU sales – cites “lower yields upstream”

The GPU market is horrendously undersupplied, so much so that practically every graphics card is guaranteed to sell in today’s retail climate. Be it from profit-focused miners or upgrade-desiring gamers, every graphics card manufactured is guaranteed to sell. 

In Q1 2021, ASUS sold fewer graphics cards than they did in Q4 2020, and ASUS blames this decline on Nvidia. ASUS could manufacture more graphics cards, and those graphics cards would sell. Right now, Nvidia is unable to manufacture enough RTX 30 series GPUs to meet the market’s seemingly unsatisfiable demand. 

In a conference call with investors, as cited by Tom’s Hardware, ASUS representatives speculated that “the gap [between supply and demand] might have been caused by lower yields upstream”. This means that Nvidia may be facing manufacturing issues with Samsung’s 8nm lithography process, giving the company less usable chips per silicon wafer than expected. 

If Nvidia could manufacture more 8nm RTX 30 series chips to ASUS, ASUS believes that they could manufacture more graphics cards and sell them to retailers/consumers. Based on ASUS’ assertations, the GPU manufacturing bottleneck lies with Nvidia, not ASUS. 

When it comes to predicting the end of today’s GPU shortage, ASUS representatives have stated that the situation is “hard for us to predict”.