NVIDIA: GeForce supply is now easing, crypto boom has ended

During the opening marks of the company's first quarter earnings call, NVIDIA CFO Colette Kress talked a little about the supply of GeForce cards and cryptocurrency. She says supply was tight earlier in the quarter, but things are easing now and it should be easier to get GeForce GTX cards at a reasonable price. As we reported earlier this week, things do indeed seem better than last quarter.

At the same time, Kress also notes cryptocurrency demand was stronger than expected. NVIDIA says they sold $289 million worth of mining-specific cards in fiscal Q1. However, cryptocurrency demand has run out of steam. NVIDIA expects crypto-specific revenue will collapse this quarter, to a level of just one-third of Q1:

While supply was tight earlier in the quarter, the situation is now easing. As a result, we were pleased to see that channel prices for our GPUs are beginning to normalize, allowing gamers who had been priced out of the market last quarter to get their hands on the new GeForce GTX at a reasonable price.

Cryptocurrency demand was again stronger than expected, but we were able to fulfill most of it with crypto-specific GPUs, which are included in our OEM business at $289 million. As a result, we could protect the vast majority of our limited gaming GPU supply for use by gamers. Looking into Q2, we expect crypto-specific revenue to be about one-third of its Q1 level.

Part of the crypto card collapse is likely due to the drop in cryptocurrency prices, while another part will be because of the upcoming ASIC miners. Interestingly, the numbers mean NVIDIA's crypto sales are double as high as the revenue AMD attributed to cryptocurrency demand during its first quarter.

NVIDIA expects demand for video cards will remain high, on one hand there's pent-up demand because a lot of gamers couldn't get cards at decent prices, and on the other hand games like Fortnite and PUBG are driving demand for new hardware.