“We’re in the worst of it now; every quarter next year, we’ll get incrementally better, but they’re not going to have supply-demand balance until 2023,” Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger told CNBC in an interview.
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What does that mean for you? Certain tech products will remain elusive for at least another 14 months, and probably longer. If there is any reason to be optimistic it’s that Gelsinger’s comments suggest we’re currently in the thick of it, and that chip supply will slowly get closer to meeting demand. These bleak forecasts come as the PC business dropped 2% during the third quarter of this year, and Intel’s share fell by more than 6% on Thursday due to a weaker-than-anticipated sales report. Intel says PC sales were down because some laptop makers were lacking the parts needed to finish assembling computers. The chips aren’t the only thing slowing down assembly lines. Gelsinger explained how it’s been difficult to get the right set of components needed to produce a product, “We call it match sets, where we may have the CPU, but you don’t have the LCD, or you don’t have the Wi-Fi. Data centers are particularly struggling with some of the power chips and some of the networking or ethernet chips." As for the other players in this space, AMD CEO Lisa Su said at Code Conference this year that supply would be “likely tight” before getting better in 2022. While she didn’t go so far as saying the shortage would end by 2023, Su suggested supply bottlenecks would be mostly sorted by then. “It might take, you know, 18 to 24 months to put on a new plant, and in some cases even longer than that,” she said, reports CNBC. “These investments were started perhaps a year ago.” The chip shortage has been exacerbated by increasing demand in personal computing resulting from the shift to remote work. PC sales, while not as strong as they were at the start of the pandemic, are still booming compared to where they were a few years ago. Keep in mind that some products will be more difficult to buy than others. Our advice, though, is to be aggressive when shopping for that laptop, console, or GPU you’ve been eyeing — that is, unless you have the enviable patience to wait another year. H/T The Verge
