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Component shortages have been plaguing the tech and gaming industries for a long time and NVIDIA appears to be taking steps to ensure that these aren’t so severe for their highly anticipated RTX 4000 GPUs.
According to a Hardware Times report, Nvidia is willing to pay TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) around $10 billion so it can secure a large portion of its 5nm manufacturing node. The award is seen as necessary given that Apple, AMD and Bitmain are also competing to supply TSMC’s 5nm manufacturing process, with Apple alone ordering 100 million “Bionic” chips from the Taiwanese foundry. (Apple’s iPhone 12, iPad Air, 5G-enabled iPad Pros, and future MacBooks and iMacs are all built using the same manufacturing process.)
The Hardware Times report cites industry rumors that Nvidia paid $1.64 billion last quarter to secure TSMC’s supply, with another $1.79 billion to be paid later this year. (Nvidia also confirmed that the company spent $9 billion last quarter on prepayments and “long-term supply obligations” in its latest earnings report.)
With that high price Nvidia will have to pay to secure manufacturing, consumers might expect some of that money to be recouped through more expensive GPUs. While Nvidia’s move avoids some of the supply issues that have plagued CPUs and GPUs this year, it could, however, help keep prices low. And there’s some hope on the horizon: TSMC believes supply shortages will improve from the second half of 2022, according to Hardware Times.
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