Chip Shortage to Continue Through Late 2022, Toshiba Warns - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 03 September 2021 / 3,464 Views
There has been a global chip shortage causing demand for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S console to far outstrip supply. It appears shortages for the latest video game consoles will continue through late 2022.
Toshiba's director in charge of semiconductors Takeshi Kamebuchi speaking with Bloomberg says chip shortages are expected to continue through at least September 2022.
"The supply of chips will remain very tight until at least September next year," said Kamebuchi. "In some cases, we may find some customers not being fully served until 2023."
Kamebuchi added game console makers are making the strongest demands and apologized for the frustration seen in the industry.
"We consider which customer faces the most severe situation, such as the risk of the whole production line halting or the business getting obliterated without the supply of chips," he said.
"Game console makers are among the customers making the strongest demands and I’m sincerely sorry for their frustration as none of them have a 100% satisfaction."
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel dedicated to gaming Let's Plays and tutorials. You can contact the author at wdangelo@vgchartz.com or on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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Way to go. This news just suddenly gave all those scalpers out there the impetus to charge even more for those consoles now. ?
This is getting ridiculous. I saw someone selling a PS5 on Walmart.com for $1,500 yesterday. This thing is getting way out of hand.
-VIDEOGAME CHIP WOES... NINJA APPROVED-
If someone really wants a PS5, the way to go is in person. You can't use bots inside a physical store. Get to know someone who works there, then have them set one aside for you. If you don't know someone, harass the managers constantly until they say they're getting a handful of them, then wait overnight the day before like it's launch again, and you're good to go.
Toshiba are not the first to state this, people have their heads in the sand.
So for everyone wanting one of those Halo limited edition series x..... it just went from rare to ultra rare
Yep, I finally gave up even trying for a Series X and went for a Series S. Ironically, I've subsequently decided that it's actually the best option for me (I'm using it in a small room, and it's tiny footprint has proven to be convenient), so it's actually lucky for me that the Series X was completely out of stock. :) But I feel for the people who'll still be trying to find Series X and PS5 for probably 1.5 years until all the pent-up demand is finally satisfied, that sucks. :(
long groan
But... does Toshiba make anything that goes into a PS5?
That is very expected, with the pandemic several electronics products are on very high demand.
Does the shortage affect Nintendo any differently than it does PS5/XS? Please someone tell me :)
Could there also be shortages of Switch on 2022 because of the chip shortage??
It doesn't affect switch now since you can just walk in and buy one so I'm not expecting it will affect switch in the future
Nintendo accepted that they will be affected by the shortage. They predicted 25.5 million units for FY21, a reduced number compared to FY20 because of the shortages.
It won’t affect them the same way as PS5 and Series X/S, but it will at some extent.
That was exactly my concern: when they predicted 25.5M for this fiscal year, one could think that it was due to an expected lower demand. However, with the chip shortage it seems that it rather is an expectation of "we will only be able to produce 25.5M consoles this year".
Theh stock of the Switch was regularly broken in Japan before the announcement of the OLED, the demand is there.
its probably why the OLED model is a thing, it has some more up to date but still weaker chips off of nodes that are easier to secure then the older now antiquated ones (no one makes 32 gig flash chips), and i actually have a somewhat strong suspision that they actually WERE going for a switch pro inside the OLED's current casing, but nintendo, after crunching the numbers, figured out that it wasn't worth it in the current market.
Same feeling here. What would be the point of launching a PRO model, just not to have enough (by far) stock of it? and that is due to this shortage
Oh... Greaaaaaat...
These comments are always rather cryptic. Do they mean that supply will meet demand at old prices by the end of 2022? I don't think so. So what would he mean? That he expects to not turn away customers by the end of 2022? Maybe, but those two things are not the same, especially for Toshiba who operate at arm's length from the actual semiconductor supply chains.
AMAT are the company to listen to, and they tend not to make predictions which are predicated upon a generalised recovery from the global Covid recessions. We're one whiff of inflation away from wiping 4 or 5% off our growth estimates for the next 5 years. And given what they say about semiconductors being the new oil... yeah.
Because I did.
Chip manufacturing ramping up isn't something that can change rapidly.
Yeah. But it's usually from my normal opponents on this forum.
Everything takes years in the tech industry, from designing chips (requiring multiple teams to leap-frog releases), to introducing smaller fabrication nodes.
The consumer see's it as a yearly/bi-yearly improvement, which it is, but the individual teams working on a single CPU or GPU design could have worked on that design for 5+ years.
Same with fabs... Going from planning to construction to built can take 5+ years.
I.E. TSMC started planning to build the Arizona fab in 2020 (With likely internal plans being earlier than that.), but it won't start producing wafers until 2024.
So 2024 is probably going to be the year where fab capacity world-wide is going to be able to exceed demand, 2022 should see some alleviation on the 7nm process, which hopefully means good things for the consoles availability... But only if agreements can be amended and other parties don't take the freed up capacity.
2023 is when supply pressures should have decreased significantly with some luck, but there will still be some supply/demand pressures.
I came here to say the same thing about 2023. If customer demand is mostly satisfied by September 2022, for purposes of this discussion the customers are Microsoft, Sony, car companies, etc. Then there's a significant manufacturing and distribution lead time before it gets to end users, and now you're talking some time in 2023 before things return to normal with regards to things being regularly in stock in stores.
