Nvidia announced its fourth-quarter earnings last night, hitting a record full-year revenue of $130.5 billion — a 114% year-over-year increase owing to the high demand for its AI chips. But despite its massive sales growth, many gamers and enthusiasts feel they’re being ignored, especially as the company only mentioned the RTX 50-series shortage but did not explain why it was happening nor say how it was dealing with the problem.
Team Green’s bread and butter used to be gaming GPUs, with the segment making up most of its sales until 2022. However, the launch of ChatGPT made artificial intelligence more accessible to the public, and many tech companies started spending billions of dollars to buy the hardware needed to train these models — such as the data center GPUs that Nvidia makes. Because of this massive demand, the company soon became the world’s most valuable by market capitalization.
Nvidia’s data center business grew from $10.61 billion in December 2021, which accounted for 39.43% of its revenue, to a whopping $115.19 billion some three years later, making up 88.27% of sales. In comparison, its gaming GPU business shrunk to $11.35 billion and 8.7% from $12.46 billion and 46.31% of the revenue share in the same time frame.
Given that the company is hitting these record numbers, especially in the data center side of its business, it doesn’t quite make sense why we’re experiencing several problems with the RTX 50-series GPUs. Aside from the lack of supply, with one retailer saying that it could take up to 16 weeks to fulfill pre-orders, there’s also the melting power connector issue making a comeback with the RTX 5090, missing ROPs, and even BSOD and black screen issues (which, thankfully, have just been addressed with a driver update).
While it’s understandable that its AI business is where the money is at right now, it’s just frustrating to many people why Nvidia could not prepare for the massive demand that its RTX 50-series GPUs had upon launch. The chip shortages during the launch of the RTX 30-series and RTX 40-series GPUs were explained by the global supply chain crisis brought by the COVID-19 pandemic. But with silicon supply chains relatively stable right now, one cannot help but wonder why Nvidia isn’t just making enough chips for the consumer side of its business.
At the very least, it should have anticipated and manufactured enough chips to avoid the shortage that we’re experiencing now — which it can definitely afford to do. After all, if there’s an abundance of RTX 50 series GPUs, then we don’t have to resort to lining up for hours (if not days) at retailers, joining lotteries just to get the opportunity to spend money, or dealing with scalpers that are selling its products for twice or even thrice the MSRP.
It’s great that Nvidia is flush with so much cash right now from its data center business that it could afford to spend more on research and development. However, it’s disappointing millions of its core fan base because many feel that the company no longer prioritizes PC gamers, especially with the botched launch of the RTX 50-series.