I've had a Best Buy tab open in my browser for so long now that I think it's technically part of my home screen. Refresh, nothing, refresh, nothing. Today's refresh came with a bonus though: an article about Samsung's Austin fab still being down, and NXP saying the same thing about its two plants there, and Infineon too. All because of the storm that hit Texas back around February 14th through the 17th. I read that and just sort of sighed at my monitor.
Quick recap for anyone who wasn't paying attention because they don't have a dead graphics card burning a hole in their pocket like I do: Texas got hammered by a winter storm that its power grid was not built to handle, millions of people lost electricity for days, people died, it was genuinely a disaster and not just a tech inconvenience. But one of the knock-on effects, buried under the human toll, is that a bunch of semiconductor fabs in the Austin area had to shut down cold, and shutting a fab down like that isn't a flip-the-switch-back-on situation. These places run 24/7 for a reason. Getting the whole process re-calibrated and back to spec takes weeks, not hours, and that's assuming the power stays on this time.
So now you've got these plants coming back online slowly, right in the middle of a chip shortage that was already ugly before any of this happened. I don't think I need to explain to anyone reading this blog what trying to buy a graphics card has been like since about October. The RTX 3080 has an MSRP of $699. I have never once seen it in stock at $699. I've seen it on eBay for $1,350. I've seen bundles where some reseller packs it with a $40 mousepad and a copy of some game nobody wants just so they can call it a "bundle" and dodge whatever scalping rules the site claims to have. Best Buy drops started happening around 11am some days, other times it's random, and there are Discord servers with literal bots pinging the second a listing goes live, and by the time a human being clicks the link it's already gone. I am not exaggerating when I say I set an alarm for a restock window last Tuesday. I lost.
And this was already true for the PS5 too, which I still don't own, an entire six-plus weeks after wanting one badly enough to actually be checking every day. My nephew got one at launch back in November and every time I see him he holds his controller up like it's a trophy. I've started actively avoiding conversations about it.
None of this is really "breaking" news today, it's more that the storm damage is still working its way through the pipeline, if you'll forgive the phrase, and stories about Samsung and NXP and Infineon's Texas operations are still trickling out this week saying recovery is going to stretch into March for some of these fabs. Samsung in particular makes chips for a huge range of things, not just GPUs, so this isn't only a gamer problem. Cars use chips too, and automakers have already been cutting production because of the broader shortage since the start of the year. Ford and GM have both idled plants over this. So somewhere down the line, buying an actual car might get harder before it gets easier, not just buying a $700 video card that's currently going for double.
I don't have a tidy conclusion here because there isn't one yet. The fabs will come back eventually, the backlog will clear eventually, and eventually I will own an RTX 3080 that I paid something close to sticker price for, probably sometime deep into a year I'd rather not guess at. In the meantime I've made peace with the fact that my 1070 is going to keep chugging along, and honestly it still runs most things fine at 1440p if I'm willing to turn a few settings down, which I am, grudgingly. My actual plan today is to just keep the Best Buy tab open and go make coffee.
One thing I'll say for the storm coverage generally: it's been a good reminder of how much of the tech stuff we take for granted, GPUs, phone chips, car computers, traces back to a small number of physical buildings in specific places, and how a single bad week of weather in one state can mess with all of it for months. Feels obvious written out like that. Didn't feel obvious to me until my shopping cart kept coming back empty.