Nvidia reportedly asks retailers to limit sales to GPU miners

With the recent cryptocurrency mining booms, GPU pricing has gone through the roof, and the supply of graphics cards has been exhausted on an almost global scale. 

Typically, in a supply-constrained scenario, the simple solution is to build more units, as the sale of these additional products are usually a guarantee provided they can be brought to market fast enough. In this case, AIB partners are apprehensive about increasing their supply of graphics cards, as this increased demand will disappear if there is another cryptocurrency crash.

GPUs take a long time to manufacture.  First AIBs need to make orders, then companies like AMD and Nvidia need to order wafers from the likes of TSMC and Globalfoundies, these chips will then need to be packaged and sent to AIB (Add-In-Board) partners, who will then need to create new graphics cards. If AIBs make huge GPU orders and there is a cryptocurrency crash within their manufacturing time, those sales vanish, and the market will then be oversupplied.  This would not be a good situation for AIB partners like ASUS, MSI, Gigabyte and Sapphire. 

Nvidia has reportedly asked retailers to stop selling graphics cards to cryptocurrency miners, setting limits on GPU sales to a single user to ensure that more graphics cards are sold to gamers. Gamers have more brand loyalty than miners, making them better customers form Nvidia and their AIB partners in the long term, as miners are driven by profits and not by branding. Below is a quote from Nvidia that was made to Computerbase (Translated from German to English).

      For NVIDIA, gamers come first. All activities related to our GeForce product line are focused on our main audience. To ensure that GeForce gamers continue to have good GeForce graphics card availability in the current situation, we recommend that our trading partners make the appropriate arrangements to meet gamers’ needs as usual.