Yesterday, while we were reading about Nvidia's Grace CPUs and data center DGUs, Nvidia was holding an investor day for shareholders. During that event, the company's top executives talked a bit about the GPU shortage that is currently plaguing many PC builders and how long they think this situation will last. Sadly, it does not appear that the entire year 2021 will be an up year, as Nvidia has once again revised its outlook.

"While overall demand remains very strong and continues to outpace supply, our channel inventory is quite short," said Nvidia CFO Colette Kress in a blog post. 'We expect demand to continue to outpace supply for most of this year. We believe supply will be sufficient to support sequential growth in the first quarter and beyond."

Kress had previously conveyed the message that lean channel inventory would continue throughout Q1, which would have to wait until May on Nvidia's corporate calendar.

Well, May is not that far off now, and it seems even less likely that things will return to normal in the coming months.

However, according to the numbers Nvidia presented in their Investors Day slides, Ampere's launch has been very successful; Nvidia reports that Ampere has more than doubled Steam's overall sales for the first six months of Turing, and that this generation has continued its strong sales growth in the first 18 weeks of the generation, which may not be that surprising given that Nvidia is selling out as fast as it makes cards, but it does highlight the increasingly huge demand for GPUs in 2021.

The demand comes not only from gamers, but also from cryptocurrency miners and those looking to profit from selling cards.

Acer recently said that component shortages will ease in late 2021, which could indicate a return to a stronger supply chain after the global supply constraints caused by the coronavirus.

AMD is also struggling to meet demand for its new RDNA 2-based RX 6000 series GPUs and has been relatively silent so far on when supply will return.

If Nvidia can at least maintain a steady supply throughout the year, demand will probably drop off naturally as the year progresses. Official guidance is clearly not optimistic.