Just look on the main online stores to realize it: video cards are almost impossible to find, and the difficulty in finding them grows in proportion to their performance. The market for these computer hardware components sees gamers as the main buyers, video game enthusiasts who are looking for increasingly powerful and performing video cards.
In the last year, however, two other factors have contributed to all this: the pandemic and the growing interest in cryptocurrency mining.
Sold out video cards
The latest generation video cards from AMD and Nvidia are almost impossible to find: they evaporate from online stores as soon as they are put on sale and the only ones left can only be bought at astronomical figures. In September 2020, for example, those who tried to buy an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 or 3090 (defined as top of the range by the manufacturer) often did not even manage to see it appear on the official website or on that of the launch partners, before that it was completely exhausted. Same story in October with the GeForce RTX 3070. Many users had complained on Twitter that the cards had been bought by various types of bots and then sold at a higher price on other sites. This is certainly an important factor, but it is not the only one that has influenced the market.
Production slowed due to the pandemic
The restrictive measures adopted around the world to limit the spread of Covid have slowed production even in the digital sector. The procurement of materials, logistics and the various stages of processing have been damaged by the interruptions and delays caused by the lockdowns and the blocking of transport. On the other hand, the closures have increased the demand for video cards: millions of people, forced to stay at home for weeks, have chosen to make purchases for entertainment and gaming, taking advantage of the moment to renew their PCs.
The success of cryptocurrencies and mining
In recent months, the value of cryptocurrencies has also grown: despite being considered a high-risk investment due to their volatility, following the digital opening imposed by Covid, bit coins are increasingly in demand. It is no coincidence that even between 2017 and 2018, during the latest cryptocurrency surge, video cards were unavailable: as the value of Bitcoin and Ethereum increases, interest in mining also grows.
This operation allows the blockchain to guarantee the security of transactions. Miners compete with each other in solving a complex mathematical problem, which requires vast resources in terms of computing power and energy. The miner who achieves the goal receives the cryptocurrency (or the percentage of transactions) in his wallet as a reward when he solves the problem. A dedicated mining system can also count 70 or 80 GeForce RTX 3080 video cards - the top of the range that had finished in seconds in September. With the current value of cryptocurrencies, a system of this type generates about $ 16,000 per month, allowing the miner to pay back expenses in just over six months.
The combination of the lockdowns imposed by the pandemic and the growing interest in mining therefore seem to have created the perfect storm in the world of video cards, making supply less and less adequate to demand.
