Chaos Breaks Out at NVIDIA Graphics Cards Restock in Dallas
A horde of customers seen charging at Micro Center.
Two weeks ago, chaos broke out when a group of eager customers charged into Walmart for restocked Pokémon cards, and now the same has happened with the latest NVIDIA GPU restock.
Captured in a livestream by Twitch user PrestonALewis (which you can view above), a massive horde of customers can be seen waiting outside the Micro Center store in Dallas, Texas before someone asked if there’ll be enough GPUs to go around for everyone, to which the store’s staff replied “No.” Chaos then ensues at around the 3:55 mark in the video when the shop opens, with the large crowd of buyers charging at the doors.
The past year has been difficult for the GPU industry, both for manufacturers and consumers. Coronavirus-related global chip shortages have significantly reduced supply from producers, which is then coupled with increasing demand from cryptocurrency miners, making graphics cards extremely hard to come by. This has led to exorbitant prices on the secondary market, with some GPUs on eBay selling for as much as $80,000 USD. In hopes of remedying the situation, NVIDIA has already taken steps to throttle mining speeds on regular cards and instead release specific mining cards, while other tech companies have stepped up investments in order to increase microchip production.
In other related news, NVIDIA has just unveiled its $1,200 USD GeForce RTX 3080 Ti.
