Times are tough financially for many, but that hasn't stopped wealthy gamers from shopping for Nvidia's RTX 4090 (opens in new tab). In fact, its popularity has led to global shortages, and we know this all too well. Newegg in the US, Overclockers in the UK, and Mwave in Australia have only one model in stock at the time of this writing.

At $1,599/£1,699/$2,959 AUD, one might think that Nvidia is rushing to produce as many AD102 GPUs as possible to meet demand, but Nvidia is shifting TSMC's production capacity to the higher-margin H100 Hopper enterprise GPUs, this may not be the case, as there are new rumors that Nvidia is shifting production capacity to the more profitable H100 Hopper enterprise GPUs. (opens in new tab)

The report comes from MyDrivers (opens in new tab) (via Tom's Hardware (opens in new tab)) The RTX 4090 is a high margin product at $1,499, but compared to the Hopper product The profit Nvidia makes on a single 4090 is relatively small; a fully enabled H100 GPU with 80GB of HBM3 sells for tens of thousands of dollars, and if a tech company wants to build an exascale supercomputer with the H100, Nvidia will be happy to oblige.

Nvidia's Ada Lovelace and Hopper series both use TSMC's 4N nodes, so packaging the H100 is fairly complex, but it would be relatively easy for TSMC to switch production to another GPU.

Second, there are concerns about China's access to advanced computing technology. Major Chinese high-tech companies, including Alibaba and Baidu, have an insatiable appetite for high-performance computing products, and NVIDIA reportedly ordered a "super hot run" of the most lucrative chips before the ban was finally implemented. [Finding the RTX 4090 may be difficult in the short term; the 4090, like the Hopper, is at least AD103 and AD104-based RTX 4080 16GB (opens in new tab) and RTX 4080 12GB (opens in new tab) (sorry, RTX 4070) are low-volume products compared to the RTX 4070. Production of these chips will be a large part of Nvidia's wafer start. Once these chips are released, they will be in higher demand than the 4090, and Nvidia will want to have enough inventory to meet global demand for the peak of the Christmas shopping season. [If you want the 4090, you'd better place a pre-order. But if Nvidia has to choose between producing 10,000 units of the 4090 and producing 10,000 units of the H100, which can be sold for 10 times more, the choice is a logical and understandable one.