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 (opens in new tab) 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 (opens in new tab). "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 (opens in new tab) will help prevent botting orders and give honest humans a shot at a card for more than 5 seconds.
