Nvidia GPUs see massive price hike and huge demand from AI

It feels like we’ve only just emerged from the debilitating graphics card shortage of the last few years, but a new report suggests we can’t breathe easy just yet. Could a new GPU shortage be on the horizon, or are consumers safe from a return to another nightmare scenario?

According to DigiTimes (via Wccftech), Nvidia is seeing a huge surge in demand for its chips due to the explosion in artificial intelligence (AI) tools like ChatGPT. Nvidia offers a range of graphics cards that excel at AI tasks, including the A100 and H100, and the company is reportedly struggling to keep up in the wake of such massive demand. Nvidia is especially feeling the strain in China, where the company is selling modified versions of the A100 and H100 in order to bypass U.S. sanctions. Because AI-capable chips are currently so hard to come by in the Chinese market, Nvidia’s modified chips — called the A800 and H800 — are absolutely flying off the shelves. This has caused Nvidia to increase the price by up to 40% above MSRP, leading to the A800 selling for as much as $36,500. Even the Nvidia V100, a card that launched in 2018, is priced as high as $10,000. Nvidia is apparently aiming to serve its non-Chinese customers first, which has led to lengthy delays in getting an AI-focused GPU in China. Wait times have reportedly increased to as much as six months from the point of ordering.

You might be wondering how that will be a problem for consumers. After all, Nvidia’s AI graphics cards are very different from its gaming GPUs, and it’s not like AI companies are going to be snapping up shedloads of the RTX 4090. Surely that means ChatGPT won’t cause another shortage, right? Well, AI is booming right now, and it is clearly a priority area for Nvidia. The risk is not that companies will buy up every single gaming GPU, but that Nvidia decides to allocate more resources towards high-end business GPUs — the type that shine when it comes to AI workloads – at the expense of consumer graphics cards. If that comes to pass, it might become much harder to get your hands on a GPU. That doesn’t appear to be happening just yet, but it may not be something that can be entirely ruled out in the future.

While the cryptocurrency boom that fueled the last GPU shortage appears to be over (at least for now), the AI revolution is rearing its head. In fact, many former crypto miners are apparently pivoting to AI in a bid to remain profitable. It’s a warning sign of what might lie ahead for anyone desperate to get a new graphics card. While a new GPU shortage is by no means guaranteed, the needs of AI businesses could heap more pressure on the graphics card supply chain.

Over the past few months, numerous cases have emerged where interactions with AI chatbots have gone haywire, culminating in lost lives, medical trauma, and incidents of psychosis. Experts suggest young users could be particularly vulnerable, especially when they’re going through emotional turmoil. ChatGPT-maker OpenAI says it will soon warn parents about such behavior.

What’s changing? The domain of AI has quickly gone from seeking answers from a chatbot to getting multi-step web-based work done for you, like booking restaurant tables, adding stuff to your Amazon cart, and performing deep back-and-forth research. But it looks like the answers you get, especially when it comes to online shopping, depend on the AI chatbot you are using.  “Platforms disagree on brand recommendations for 61.9% of queries,” says an analysis conducted by BrightEdge. The company assessed tens of thousands of shopping-related questions that were provided to ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews, and Google’s AI Mode in Search. 

Social media began as a tool for staying connected with the people you love. Over time, its harms were exposed, leading to these platforms building parental control tools. It seems a similar movement for AI chatbots, starting with the one that started it all — ChatGPT. OpenAI has announced that it is exploring parental guardrails while using ChatGPT. “We will also soon introduce parental controls that give parents options to gain more insight into, and shape, how their teens use ChatGPT,” the company said in a blog post.