AMD's latest Ryzen 5000 CPUs have been selling like hotcakes during the holiday season, and similar to the graphics card shortages, it's very difficult to find AMD's shiny new Ryzen 5000 series CPUs in stock anywhere. But it looks like that could change soon, Scan, a UK based e-tailer has confirmed it will be getting nearly four thousand CPUs by the last week of December and more beginning in January. Hopefully, this news should apply to most retailers -- including in North America, as well.
Quoting from Scan's Ryzen 5000 series status page directly:
02/12/20 - No new shipments have arrived since the last update. We have added new expected shipments to the table for WC 28th December. With these shipments we expect to be able to clear the pre-order queues of 5950X, 5800X and 5600X before the end of the year with the 5900X queue clear by WC 4th January. We are still working hard to confirm more shipments to arrive over the coming 2 weeks which could reduce this further.
That's not the best news either, it seems the week before on the 21 of December, Scan is getting over two thousand Vermeer CPUs too. So between the two final weeks of December Scan will receive over six thousand CPUs. It looks like the vast majority of units will be Ryzen 5 5600X's and Ryzen 7 5800X's. While 5900X and 5950X volume will be significantly less.
However beware, all this data is expected stock, any of these numbers could change in the near future.
It's good to hear at least on the CPU side of things, stock seems to be going much better than on AMD's GPU division. Again, this is just one company, however, if AMD is restocking Scan with this many CPUs, there's a good chance AMD will be doing the same thing to all major retailers like Best Buy, Amazon, Newegg, Micro Center etc.
So hopefully you'll be able to grab a new AMD CPU by the end of December, or at least be the start of January. If you are planning a new build now, be sure to check out our Best Holiday Tech Deals to help you out.