GPU Winter Is Coming, again..

Remember when Crypto got really hot and GPUs started disappearing into Texas and Chinese GPU farms, Nvidia couldn’t shovel enough chips onto the fire to bring up their results and it resulted in significant affordability issues for gamers and delayed technology adoption?

It’s about to happen again. Over the last few month, prices of the top end GPUs (4090, 4080, 3090) have risen some 30% in many markets as these cards have enough VRAM to be useful in AI Inference usecases - and NVIDIAs supply of industrial GPUs is sold out entirely for a year to come.

The world is about to go into a very serious AI GPU crunch (in part due to export control bustingand as industrial cards are unavailable, gaming cards will start getting cannibalized … again.

Game companies, already facing serious funding headwinds from high interest rates, collapsed deals and companies like Unity trying to protect their share holders at the expense of developers can add another worry to their list - GPU market woes causing technology adoption slowdowns, rising cost of inventory and associated market distortions - money spent on GPUs isn’t spent on games and min-spec forecasting for game products will become unreliable.

And then there’s the challenge of AI adoption in gaming itself. It’s expensive but powerful and fundamentally requires GPU capacity that’s now in serious contention and so any gaming ambitions at leveraging the technology may be hindered by inability to secure capacity and challenges to forecast pricing development on cloud inferences.