Scalpers were especially notorious during the launch of the long-awaited PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. Many often work as groups to buy thousands of products in bulk in order to sell them at ungodly markups. However, the last few months of 2020 brought out scalpers by the droves out of the woodwork. Its usually not much of a threat to face one scalper who works as a lone wolf by snagging a few RTX 3080s to sell at 200 percent of its MSRP. A scalper is a term given to people who buy freshly launched products and sell them on eBay or StockX at highly inflated prices to make a profit. Whenever there’s a highly anticipated product launch, you can expect to find scalpers prowling at the front of the line.

Thus, the question on everyone’s mind is: why are supplies so low? It’s the fact that manufacturers are unable to produce new graphics cards in order to match the exceeding demand that has got everybody in a rut. However, demand exceeding supply is not unusual for the PC hardware industry.

Both Nvidia and AMD have stated that the current demand for GPUs has exceeded their expectations, mostly due to the generational leaps in performance that both Ampere and Navi cards brought along with their releases. Industry analysts and insiders have come forward and said that the graphics card shortage boils down to consumers’ demand exceeding the current supply. Even low end and midrange GPUs like the GTX 1650 has seen inflated prices that are up to 300 to 400 percent of its MSRP. When it comes to graphics cards (or lack thereof), the situation has only gotten worse since. In a completely unprecedented sequence of events, the world- which underwent a harrowing series of trials and tribulations last year- is facing extreme supply issues in many industries. The reason for this is none other than the fact that the industry is currently facing the largest GPU shortage in history. The few that are in stock have had their prices hike up by hundreds of dollars.

If you look up GPUs in Amazon or Newegg, you’ll be greeted with hundreds of listings that are almost all sold out. If you’ve been eyeing to build your own gaming or workstation PC, you may have asked yourself where in the world all of the graphics cards have gone.

Graphics card shortage