Interesting. This says cards are being impacted by GDDR6 shortage, and GDDR6X is less impacted:
French website Cowcotland, which is usually well oriented in the AIB’s supply channels, claims that the global GPU supply is also affected by a lack of GDDR6 memory. AMD Radeon RX 6000 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 supply not to improve until February? According to the report, NVIDIA and AMD may...
videocardz.com
I don't know if that tells us anything useful. There are a lot of products that use GDDR6 and very few that use GDDR6X and the number of companies that can manufacture memory modules for each also differs in a similar fashion at the current moment.
It's a bit like saying that TSMC 7nm is in short supply which is true, but that companies aren't experiencing supply issues with TSMC 5nm, which may be true assuming that Apple and Qualcomm are getting as much as they need. It's a statement that can be technically true, but also deceiving because it's really about a relative rate as opposed to any kind of absolute numbers.
I'm not familiar with the source used be the article and the fact that it's in French makes it a lot more difficult to evaluate their track record or much else about them. I don't know how good of a job the automated translation does, but the reasoning for the rumor isn't something that I necessarily buy:
If NVIDIA did mention an insufficient production of wafers, and therefore of GPUs, to explain the lack of availability of RTX 3000 graphics cards, it would seem in fact that the concern is also to be attributed to the GDDR6 memory which is used by a large number of models, including the RX 5000, the RX 6000, the GTX 1000, RTX 2000 and part of the RTX 3000. According to our sources, if there are some GPUs that are produced, there is no against no GDDR6 at all currently. This explains why almost all graphics cards are experiencing supply issues, simply because it is impossible to build these cards currently.
This doesn't make a lot of sense. The memory isn't being manufactured somewhere like TSMC that's seeing increased demand for wafers (I'm pretty sure all of the major memory manufacturers have their own fabs) and the older processes that were used for GDDR6 would have only matured further since the introduction of the technology and would have even better yields. There aren't any products outside of GPUs that use GDDR6 that I'm aware of and if it's a matter of reduced production, it would be necessary to ask what Micron, SK Hynix, et al have devoted wafers to instead of GDDR6. The existing products are old previous generation cards that Nvidia and AMD had already stopped manufacturing or would have stopped manufacturing now that the new cards to replace them are coming out, particularly in the case of AMD since if you have spare wafers to devote to GPU production you don't spend any on an old product unless it's to fulfill some contract.
I don't know who they got their rumor from, but it seems bad given everything else we know. AMD has no GPUs because of the massive number of wafers that Sony and Microsoft ordered for their new consoles which eats up a lot of AMD's capacity. The remaining wafers have to be split between several product lines and Zen 3 chiplets are far more profitable for AMD to manufacture so it's easy to see that they're wafer limited more than anything else.
Nvidia's case isn't quite as clear since we don't know as much about the Samsung 8nm process. There have been rumors suggesting that it has issues which means that even if Nvidia has more wafers, the yields may not be nearly as good as expected also limiting their supply of Ampere dies. A lot of rumors also had Ampere launching in 2021 and the general lack of supply also points towards a launch that was pushed up a bit.
Both companies are seeing increased prices for their older generation cards which points to those not being resupplied in numbers sufficient to keep the price down. It's likely that both have seriously cut back on production or aren't making additional dies and manufacturers are just going through the last of the wafers for those cards. Unless the memory manufacturers cut back on GDDR6 production, there's no reason for AMD or Nvidia not to have sufficient memory because they cut production of the previous cards that would have otherwise been using that GDDR6 memory.