The semiconductor shortages continue to worsen, according to a recent Bloomberg report, Lead times, which is the amount of time it takes for a customer, like an OEM or chip designer (like AMD or Nvidia), to receive their chip has stretched out to a whopping 20.2 weeks for more advanced semiconductors, and 26.5 weeks for microcontrollers and logic chips. According to the Susquehanna Financial Group, a firm that researches semiconductor shortages, this is the longest wait time recorded since the firm started tracking data in 2017.
Effectively this means the chip shortage is getting worse as a whole, despite reduced GPU scalper prices and decent CPU stock we're experiencing right now. If lead times continue to get worse, we could see more price hikes for CPUs and GPUs in the future as demand intensifies as we get closer to this year's holiday season.
However, this all depends on chip designers like AMD, Nvidia, and Apple ordering chips as early as possible to keep production rolling. Thankfully these companies are some of the largest customers for semiconductor chips.
But there's still hope on the horizon, several previous reports from TSMC and other experts in the industry have predicted that the tech shortage will end around the year 2022 or 2023. At best we should only have to wait another year or two before supply normalizes, but the recovery will be uneven for different market segments.
The automotive market appears to suffer the brunt of the long-term impact, largely because those chips are produced on older process nodes that aren't produced as widely. In contrast, chips for desktop PCs, like CPUs and GPUs, are produced on leading-edge nodes that continue to increase in production capacity. As such, it's logical to expect those segments to recover sooner than others.
