The Big Global Chip Shortage

Last year, Jedd Dubon, a PC gamer from Brooklyn, bought a graphics card piece that he needed to build his PC. But thanks to a chip shortage created by problems in the global supply chain, the retail price of $699.99 for an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080—one of the top graphics cards in the industry—had doubled and sometimes even tripled. Scalpers, hoping to cash in, purchased a majority of the supply to resell. “I think it’s ridiculous,” says Dubon, 25. “Over the pandemic, we already had to pay an arm and a leg for just this one [graphics card] because of the shortages.”

Many New Yorkers are facing the same struggle when trying to purchase a variety of items, including the semiconductor chip Dubon is so desperate for. The problem: a disruption in the supply chain responsible for distributing goods.

A semiconductor chip consists of an electric circuit with many components that are used in technology equipment such as computers, smartphones, appliances, gaming hardware and medical equipment. In a world where everything is heavily connected digitally by technology and the internet, it’s becoming an increasingly worrisome problem now that supplies of these chips have run short. Along with technological entertainment such as PCs, consoles, and TVs, production of everyday necessities, including cars, has been postponed as well. According to the New York Times, “General Motors, Honda, Nissan and Stellantis reported significant declines in sales in the three months that ended in September—in G.M.’s case, a drop of one-third from a year earlier—as chip shortages forced them to idle plants, leaving dealers with few vehicles to offer customers.”

Alongside car distributors having to cease production, the gaming industry is facing heavy hits. Next-generation consoles from Sony and Microsoft, the Xbox series X/S and PlayStation 5 (PS5) have been difficult to find. Even though these consoles were released almost a year ago in November, only a few lucky gamers have been able to get their hands on the consoles, and even fewer for the retail price. In the first few months of the release, PS5’s were going for over $1,500 on eBay; again, blame scalpers. People were even selling their empty PS5 boxes for hundreds of dollars. Today the PS5 is selling on average for about $850 on eBay, with a few over $1,000, compared to its $499.99 retail price.

Ariel Cotugno, a 21-year-old console gamer from Queens, has been affected by the problem. “When I worked at GameStop, we were only receiving production every few months, and the inventory was extremely limited,” Cotugno said. “Once the consoles were in, they were gone in literally minutes. It stayed like that consistently and is still like that now, even months after I’ve stopped working there.”

The longer the shortage lasts, the more in demand these products will become and the more competition between people to snap them up. “This shortage has been crazy,” said Kayla Caliendo, 22, a PC gamer from Manhattan. “And the cryptocurrency miners haven’t been making things any easier, by purchasing a bunch of the graphics cards in large quantities so they can mine their bit or dogecoin or whatever. Meanwhile gamers have to suffer and wait in lines for over 24 hours to even be able to have a chance at getting our hands on one.”