Profiteers resold practically 50,000 Nvidia Ampere graphics playing cards prior to now a number of months on websites like eBay and StockX, raking in roughly $61.5 million in gross sales and a revenue of $15.2 million.
Oracle information engineer Michael Driscoll wrote up an online script that scraped information from eBay and StockX – a resale website usually used for hard-to-find sneakers – to quantify the size of the graphics card profiteering and what he discovered is miserable, however not stunning.
To this point, 49,680 RTX 30-series graphics playing cards have been offered by way of the 2 websites, starting from the lower-end RTX 3060 Ti to the high-end RTX 3090, with the majority of the gross sales coming from the RTX 3070 and RTX 3080.
Driscoll has additionally analyzed AMD Massive Navi profiteering because it’s launch and located that it’s far much less prevalent than with Nvidia’s Ampere playing cards, with simply 3,461 RDNA2 graphics playing cards between the 2 websites. This means a a lot decrease demand for Massive Navi playing cards, at the very least amongst these prepared to pay an enormous mark up for the privilege of proudly owning a hard-to-find GPU.
It was nonetheless worthwhile, although. With round $3.95 million in gross sales of the three Massive Navi playing cards, profiteers had been capable of rake in nearly $1 million in revenue.
To make issues worse, PCMag factors out, a brand new 25% US tariff went into impact on January 1 that features GPUs imported from China, so costs went up much more, throughout the board.
Profiteering is not new and it is not going anyplace
Profiteering, often referred to with the extremely problematic time period “scalping,” is about as outdated as civilization. Whether or not it is flour, drugs, or graphics playing cards, somebody someplace goes to benefit from shortage and demand to extract as a lot revenue as they will from a commodity.
We’re seeing the identical factor occur with the brand new AMD Zen 3 CPUs in addition to Xbox Sequence X|S and PS5 consoles, which has been largely because of bots have undoubtedly tilted the taking part in discipline in ways in which we solely used to see with royal charters, monopolies, and trusts.
Social media additionally hasn’t helped issues in any respect. Whereas profiteering is not new, seeing them anonymously gloat and rub their scheming within the face of an indignant public undoubtedly is.
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Producers and retailers try to fight the issue by reviewing orders earlier than transport the product and even utilizing a lottery system for purchases. How efficient these strikes will probably be is anybody’s guess, but when we needed to put cash on it, we would guess on greed each time.
