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Nvidia, one of the world’s leading providers of memory modules, is warning investors that a slowdown in demand has created a glut of memory chips on the market, according to a report in Ars Technica.

A year ago, it was nearly impossible to buy a GeForce GPU for its intended retail price. Nvidia now complains of “excess inventory” of memory chips. During the company’s recent Q2 2023 earnings call, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the company is dealing with “excess inventory” of RTX 3000-series GPUs ahead of its next-gen RTX 4000 series release later this year.

To combat the excess, Huang said, Nvidia will reduce the number of GPUs it sells to graphics cards and laptop manufacturers so that those manufacturers can clear out their existing inventory.

Demand is “down across the board”

Nvidia announced that it would be missing its quarterly projections by $1.4 billion earlier this month, mainly due to decreased demand for its gaming GPUs. Huang said that the ‘sell-through’ of GPUs, or the number of cards being sold to users, had “increased 70 percent since pre-COVID”, though the company still expects year-over-year revenue from GPUs to decline next quarter.

Demand for PCs and PC components is mostly down across the board, Ars Technica says. This is partly because of recession fears and partly because people bought so much PC hardware early in the pandemic, they say. Nvidia is also selling fewer GPUs to cryptocurrency miners because of falling prices and Ethereum’s long-anticipated transition away from GPU mining.

The upshot for consumers is that new and used GPU prices should continue to fall, as they have been for most of the year. Furthermore, consumers can expect at least a few RTX 3000-series cards to hang around well after the launch of the RTX 4000 series.