NVIDIA Games on Through Global Chip Shortage

Although the global chip shortage and breaks in the logistics chain due to COVID-19 posed new challenges for the consumer electronics market, graphics card veteran NVIDIA managed to come out of it unscathed. The second quarter of 2021 alone accounted for a record revenue of 5.7 billion US dollars, with its core gaming market, data center solutions and OEM products as the clear winners in the year-over-year comparison.

Since NVIDIA is primarily known for its graphics processing units (GPU), it's no surprise that the second-biggest growth compared to the first quarter of 2020 has been in the gaming department with 106 percent. Following a tumultuous launch of its new 3060, 3070 and 3080 models in February due to stock shortages and resellers and bitcoin miners scooping up a lot of units, the corporation introduced new features to reduce the viability of mining with its regular gaming GPUs this past quarter.

The gaming GPU market has become a duopoly over the last years, with NVIDIA and AMD as the big players. Even though both companies manufacture their own graphics cards, most of the models including the respective chipsets are cards by other manufacturers. In direct comparison, NVIDIA wins the graphics race: According to AMD's latest quarterly report, its computing and graphics division including client microprocessors, GPUs and data center solutions generated approximately 2.6 billion US dollars between March and June of 2021.