Nvidia Issues Mea Culpa Over Bungled GeForce RTX 3080 Launch

Nvidia (NVDA) has apologized to customers following the hotly-anticipated launch of its GeForce RTX 3080 launch last week.

NVDA called the launch “simultaneously the best GPU launch ever and the most frustrating” after the GeForce RTX 3080 sold out almost instantly.

“We expected the best ever demand for the RTX 30-series, but the enthusiasm was overwhelming. We were not prepared for this level, nor were our partners. We apologize for this” it wrote on September 21.

Indeed, the Nvidia store was inundated with over 10 times the traffic of its previous generation launch, the chip maker revealed.

“The reception to our NVIDIA Ampere architecture GPUs has been off the charts and driven interest to heights we’ve never previously experienced. A few examples compared to our previous launch – 4 times the unique visitors to our website, 10 times the peak web requests per second, and more than 15 times the out clicks to partner pages” it said.

Over 50 major global retailers had inventory on the day of launch- but the extent of the traffic caused crashes, delays and other issues for customers.

According to Nvidia, the GeForce RTX 3080 is still in full production, and it has now been increasing the supply weekly. Partners are also ramping up capacity to meet the unprecedented demand, says NVDA.

Nvidia also revealed that its store was overrun with malicious bots and resellers- and in response it has made several changes, including moving the store to a dedicated environment, with increased capacity and more bot protection. It also cancelled hundreds of bot orders manually before they were able to ship.

Shares in Nvidia have more than doubled year-to-date, and the stock scores a bullish Strong Buy consensus from the Street. That’s with 24 recent buy ratings vs 4 hold ratings and just 1 sell rating. Meanwhile the average analyst price target indicates 12% further upside lies ahead.

RBC Capital analyst Mitch Steves has a buy rating on the chip stock with a $610 price target and argues that gaming should grow mid- single digits long term.

He notes that gaming remains the largest segment for the company and writes: “Overall, we are bullish long term given multiple tailwinds including: 1) complexity of video games; 2) virtual reality; and 3) the potential for more customers to shift to NVIDIA products vs. AMD GPU gaming products.” (See NVDA stock analysis on TipRanks)