Nvidia continues to cause a consumer frenzy thanks to the limited inventory of its latest graphics card, the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Founders Edition.
The company aims to serve gamers, but its graphics cards are also effective in performing artificial-intelligence calculations and mining cryptocurrencies — making them highly desirable and hard to find.
And that’s on top of the semiconductor shortage plaguing the tech industry.
Last week, the California-based chip maker released its new $1,199 graphics card exclusively at brick-and-mortar Best Buy locations.
The catch? Only one Best Buy per state received the RTX 3080 Ti Founders Edition, with just 64 units available at each location. Over 200 hopeful consumers lined up at Best Buy in West Los Angeles.
“The final insult Nvidia could throw at us was in giving 64 cards to the entire city of Los Angeles,” Everette Fuqua, who lined up at 3:30 a.m. to score the card, told PCMag.
Despite the lack of inventory, Nvidia has enjoyed a monster start to its fiscal 2022.
- Reported $5.6 billion in revenue in Q1, an 84% increase year-over-year.
- Earnings beat Wall Street estimates of $5.41 billion.
- Its gaming business reported record-breaking revenue of $2.76 billion in Q1, up 106% year-over-year.
Nvidia recently submitted an application to Chinese regulators to review a $40 billion acquisition of Arm, a British semiconductor and software company, per Reuters.
Nvidia anticipates the deal will close by March 2022 and help alleviate its inventory issues.
