Initially, it seemed capacity issues at TSMC or yields at Samsung were to blame, coupled with massive demand due to the stay-at-home economy as well as a renewed interest from cryptocurrency miners.
Last week, NVIDIA CEO Colette Kress revealed supply of GeForce RTX 30 series cards is also affected by shortages of certain substrates and component. She said it would take several more months to balance supply and demand.
Now a rumor is going around that one of the components that is in short supply is GDDR6 memory. Cowcotland claims the GeForce RTX 3080 and 3090 are less affected by this issue as those cards use GDDR6X, but even those models are hard to get. Cowcotland writes availability of GPUs isn't expected to get much better until February and that some video cards are delayed because of this:
According to our sources, it will take weeks for the situation to return to normal, which means that the availability of all models will not improve until February, even by blocking the release of some models (such as the 6900XT Custom) […]Via: VideoCardz
— Aurélien LAGNY, Cowcotland