In the immortal phrases of CJ, “Ah, s#$%, here we go again.” If you’ve been maintaining with the tech information within the final yr, you little question know that “Artificial Intelligence” is the subsequent large factor — heck, you’ll be able to even use it to search for info from PCWorld’s archives. That sort of progress potential has traders salivating and engineers scrambling for {hardware}. Unfortunately, it appears like consumer-grade GPUs are a good way to spice up your processing energy for AI computations…similar to they have been for crunching numbers for cryptocurrency.

If that sounds acquainted, it’s as a result of the crypto growth within the late 2010s and the beginning of the pandemic in 2020 created an absolute nightmare for anybody who needed to purchase a GPU. Graphics card road costs ballooned to double and even triple their retail worth, with scalpers and purchaser bots making all of it however not possible for normal previous PC players to get a brand new card. Fortunately that’s died down and GPU costs have normalized, however loads of PC players are nonetheless smarting from the unhealthy occasions, like Dust Bowl migrants hanging on to their trauma.

The new growth in AI is inflicting large investments in corporations like Nvidia, which recently had its best quarter ever largely on sturdy gross sales to AI companies. Twitter and Tesla’s eXuberant CEO Elon Musk has reportedly purchased thousands of GPUs for a new AI project. This shift out there has reportedly led Nvidia to all but halt production of the RTX 4000 series (which is experiencing much less demand from players anyway, due to poor bang-to-buck ratios on playing cards just like the RTX 4060 Ti) in favor of “Hopper” playing cards for B2B gross sales to company AI companies.

So between startups bootstrapping consumer-grade graphics playing cards to make new AI companies, and bigger corporations taking on all of the manufacturing throughput of corporations to make GPUs within the first place, analysts are anxious that we might see yet another card shortage only a yr or two after the final one lastly ended. The thought began spreading after an government for Comma, the maker of AI-powered self-driving software program, tweeted a photo of dozens of freshly-purchased RX 7900 XTX graphics playing cards.

Fears of a brand new scarcity haven’t performed out out there to this point. If something, GPU costs are barely beneath retail in the mean time, with Intel coming on strong with a number of wonderful cut price choices and AMD poised to introduce new mid-range cards later this yr. But if you happen to’re planning a brand new gaming PC construct or improve with the best GPUs, you would possibly wish to get a purchase order in sooner reasonably than later.