AMD Radeon RX Vega supply to be very limited due to HBM2 issues?

An industry source confided to TweakTown that the launch of AMD's Radeon RX Vega lineup will be a whimper because the company can't get its hands on sufficient HBM2. Word on the street is that HBM2 is in extremely limited supply, a problem that is not only driving up the cost of the Radeon RX Vega but is also severely limiting the cards' availability.

If the rumor is true, AMD is currently stockpiling HBM2 in order to make the launch as big as possible. This could partly explain why the card is taking so long to launch. The source claims there will be fewer than 16,000 cards in the first few months after launch, so getting your hands on a Vega card may be very difficult.

I've been told that there will be less than 16,000 cards that will ship in the first few months after it launches, something that will come down to the HBM2 used on the card. HBM2 is in extremely limited supply, and is expensive to use - and since there's not enough, that scarcity is driving up the production costs of the card - and will see AMD only having 16,000 cards or so in the months post-launch.

This rumor also sounds very similar to what happened with AMD's Radeon R9 Fury lineup, which suffered from poor availability of first-gen HBM when it launched roughly two years ago. And it could also explain why NVIDIA isn't using HBM2 for high-volume products just yet.