NVIDIA next-gen GeForce cards delayed due to crypto mining fallout?

So this is another of those stories to take with a grain of salt. As we wrote earlier this week, there are a lot of question marks about NVIDIA's next-gen GeForce gaming cards. The firm planned to host a talk about its new products at the Hot Chips 30 symposium, but the event got removed from the roster.

So what's going on? Charlie Demerjian from SemiAccurate claims he scored details about why NVIDIA delayed the consumer Volta. Not sure if that's really the name of the next-gen cards, as there is (or was) also talk about Ampere or Turing. Either way, the article is behind a paywall but the meat can be found at Seeking Alpha.

The gist is that NVIDIA seems to be experiencing a gaming GPU inventory problem. The company reportedly badly misjudged gaming GPU demand, basically a lot more GPUs may have ended up in the hands of cryptocurrency miners than the company calculated. Instead of a big gaming boom, demand may have been driven primarily by Ethereum and other altcoin miners.

The article blames NVIDIA's management for misreading demand and points out there's now a severe glut of Pascal-based cards. Allegedly, one of the top 3 Taiwanese OEMs send 300,000 GPUs back to NVIDIA because they don't know what to do with them:

This is quite notable news as Nvidia usually exerts massive influence over its partners and can be quite ruthless with allocations of new GPUs if partners step out of line. The fact that this partner returned these GPUs says a lot about the current state of supply in the channel. The report also cites Nvidia aggressively buying GDDR5 as evidence that they now have an excess stock of lower-end GPUs that need to be made into boards as well as other insiders/sources citing an inventory buildup.

One of the results of this is that NVIDIA sees itself forced to delay it next-gen GeForce cards, as they need to work through an unexpectedly large inventory of Pascal cards.

As usual, there's no way to verify this story, but it seems logical. I've always had the feeling that AMD and NVIDIA downplayed the importance of cryptocurrency mining. NVIDIA's Gaming revenue grew tremendously the last couple of quarters. There is no doubt gaming is doing very well, but did all those PUBG and Fortnite players really resulted in 50 percent year-over-year growth? I guess we'll find out when NVIDIA releases its next earnings report.