Nvidia sales surge as it struggles to keep gaming chips in stock

Nvidia Corp forecast better-than-expected fiscal first-quarter revenue on Wednesday, with its flagship gaming chips expected to remain in tight supply for the next several months.

As people wait for COVID-19 vaccine rollouts around the world, stay-at-home orders have kept demand high for chips that speed up video games. But the Santa Clara, California-based company’s gaming chips have also regained popularity for mining cryptocurrency, a trend Nvidia is trying to counter by offering special mining chips in order to free up graphics chip supplies for gamers during a global chip shortage.

While Nvidia was long known for its gaming graphic chips, its aggressive push into artificial intelligence chips that handle tasks such as speech and image recognition in data centers has helped it become the most valuable semiconductor maker by market capitalization.