According to the company’s fourth quarter earnings report, Nvidia has reportedly spent up to $9 billion to secure access to TSMC’s 5nm process, allowing it to have sufficient inventory for the launch of its future RTX 4080 / 90 and co. products.
Nvidia wants to avoid prolonging the crazy period we’ve been through
The latest rumors suggest an arrival of the RTX 40 series in September 2022. The next cards would be manufactured with the 5 nm process of TSMC and the Ada Lovelace architecture. While there are conflicting opinions about the upcoming performance, one thing now seems to be definite: the manufacturing cost will be strongly increasing. If the inflation on component prices is general, TSMC seems determined to use its position. It was revealed a few months ago that NVIDIA and Qualcomm in particular, had been forced to pay a significant advance to reserve part of the production capacity at the founder.
RTX 4080 /4090: high prices but availability?
According to industry rumors, NVIDIA paid TSMC $1.64 billion last quarter to reserve its share of the 5nm pie, with another $1.79 billion to be paid in Q1 of 2022. Overall, the greens will spend nearly $10 billion to secure its 5nm cake for RTX 40XX. Production issues have generated extreme situations in the graphics card market for the past 2 years. However, TSMC and its foundry partners are quite optimistic about the situation, saying that supply should start to improve from the second half of the year.
