Nvidia CEO says RTX 3000 demand 'will outstrip all of our supply' through the end of the year

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Too many gamers, not enough cards.

Nvidia's Jen-Hsun Huang
(Image credit: Nvidia)

Don't hold out hope for the RTX 3080—or the upcoming RTX 3070—being easy to buy anytime soon. In a call with analysts and journalists today, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that "I believe that demand will outstrip all of our supply throughout the year."

Last week, Nvidia delayed the RTX 3070 launch by two weeks, to October 29, to build up as much supply as possible. But that seems unlikely to be enough to compensate for the demand for the more affordable RTX card. Jensen doesn't seem to think so, either.

"Remember, we're also going into the double-whammy: The double-whammy is the holiday season," he said on the call, as reported by Tom's Hardware. "Even before the holiday season we were doing incredibly well, and then you add on top of it, the Ampere factor, and then you add on the Ampere holiday factor, and we're going to have a really really big Q4 season."

Huang claims that this isn't a problem with Nvidia's supply, but rather a "demand issue"—meaning the demand was simply beyond their expectations. "And we expected really a lot," he said.

In a year where COVID has significantly impacted manufacturing and shipping, though, it's hard not to be skeptical of claims that Nvidia's supply lines are running at full steam. But bots and resellers certainly haven't helped the situation. Hopefully by the RTX 3070 launch, changes to the Nvidia store and its manual oversight will help prevent botting orders and give honest humans a shot at a card for more than 5 seconds.

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Wes Fenlon
Wes Fenlon
Senior Editor

Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.


When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).