The Semi Chip Shortage Is Over

NYT

On Tech email column no link

by Shira Ovide

Snippet

What has changed?

In recent weeks, computer chips have suddenly seemed to become abundant. Several computer chip companies have warned that their sales are going from hot to not. Unused chips are piling up in South Korea, a major manufacturing hub, at the fastest rate in years.

A big reason is that people around the world are not buying electronics like laptops, smartphones and TVs as much as they were a year or two ago. Lots of people are worried about climbing prices and the health of economies and are holding back. So companies are cutting orders for computer chips that would have been built into many products.

This is how the economy and computer chips tend to work. When people feel good and are spending a lot, chip factories ramp up to make way more. Almost always, they overproduce and there are too many chips. Some experts have said that the pandemic mania would be followed by a chip bust. We’re not there yet, but we’ll see.

3 Likes

In recent weeks, computer chips have suddenly seemed to become abundant. Several computer chip companies have warned that their sales are going from hot to not. Unused chips are piling up in South Korea, a major manufacturing hub, at the fastest rate in years.

Have we seen this movie before? The Friday after thanksgiving, 2000, Broadcom issued an earnings warning. As the weeks passed, more chip companies were issuing warnings. Seems that customers had been double and triple ordering chips in the hope that one of the orders would be delivered on time. Once fab capacity caught up with demand, the duplicate orders were cancelled, and, with the cancelled orders, the earnings warnings came, and the tech collapse started.

Steve

2 Likes

The (hopefully final) end of the crypto insanity had a big impact. Not only aren’t miner buying up graphics chips anymore, they’re actively selling the things. The price of a NVIDIA RTX 3070 has come down around 40% since the beginning of this year.

4 Likes

AD,

I am beginning to watch the NVDA GPUs carefully. Nvidia just came out with a driver or software AI that is by far their best yet for ultra low sampling counts when rendering near prefect images. I have an AMD card that is not up to that. My next project is 140 animations already fully planned out. I will be picking up a new graphic card this fall. It means buying a new power supply for my box…again…

1 Like