As we have already seen a few hours ago, NVIDIA cannot sell the RTX 4060 Ti at the same speed as their other graphics cards, however Jen Hsen Huang doesn’t seem to care at all about the situation and it’s like they already knew this was going to happen. The reason? Profits from the professional market are skyrocketing and it is keeping them from falling into the hardware crisis.
It’s no secret that for some time now NVIDIA has targeted beyond the gaming market as potential customers for its technology. In the mid-2000s it was the high-performance computing market with the launch of CUDA, in 2017 it was the commitment to AI, adding Tensor Cores for the first time with Volta. In the midst of a boom in generative artificial intelligence services such as ChatGPT, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion and many others, their bet is allowing them to save themselves from the current crisis in the PC hardware market.
The hardware crisis does not affect NVIDIA: its profits skyrocket
While NVIDIA does not stop selling its professional graphics cards, filling their coffers and increasing their stock market value to levels that are less exaggerated. The story from the perspective of the so-called GeForce RTX is not so encouraging, given that gaming revenues during the first quarter of this year fell by 38% compared to the previous year. But it is a general weakness in the PC market.
However, all this has an explanation and that is that given the growing demand in the professional market, NVIDIA began to reduce the production of models for the domestic marketthose considered for gaming, with the aim of satisfy the professional market, a sector of the market that gives more benefits. The result? Going from 7.19 billion dollars in the first quarter to a double-digit figure, the increase reaching up to 27% at the best of times.
The bottom line is simple, thanks to the AI boom, NVIDIA has found a niche to sell its graphics cards to the professional market and has been able to save itself from the general slump in the home PC hardware market.
NVIDIA fails to sell the RTX 4060 Ti in Japan
In Japan, when a successful product goes on sale, it is common for stores to open earlier than usual to serve all the demand for it. However, what has happened with the sales of the RTX 4060 Ti in the country of the rising sun is surprising to say the least and we could consider it almost a parody. Well, it seems that in the most important store in the Akihabara neighborhood from tokyo they could only sell the RTX 4060 Ti to one person.
And yes, we know what many of you are thinking, that the country of the rising sun is atypical, since it is usually associated more with consoles than with computers. But it is a false myth, what is true is that they are more portable and All-in-One computers due to the little space they have in their homes compared to Western users. However, in that country there were platforms such as the first and second generation MSX, the powerful X68000 from Sharp, the PC-88 and PC-98 from NEC and the FM Towns from Fujitsu. So the culture of playing on a computer has always existed.
So NVIDIA’s commitment to derive part of TSMC’s production to its professional GPUs has paid off, given the low demand for its graphics cards in some parts of the world. Of course, it is something specific that is still a curiosity and at no time should it be generalized.