COVID-19.

- factory closures and employee issues.

- supply chain issues due to covid.

- wfh demand.

- gaming demand.

- trump tax tariffs. Gpu exemption expired in January. I’m not sure if CPU’s are affected.

The biggest contributors are WFH demand, more PC gaming, but especially crypto mining and release of new consoles.

Mining and the new consoles take tons of silicon. And everybody is competing for the same fabs.

Supply chain problems and tariffs aren't doing much (if anything). Fabs run 24/7 365 and we just can't make enough chips

Because they don't want to be dismissed towards Intel, and also that's a move that will earn you a lot of ill will.

Instead, these companies allow resellers to sell above MSRP and send AMD/NVidia/etc... a cut.

Really? I thought this was because demand anticipation is hard, and chip manufacturing requires a long pipeline

Yeah, the system integrators are getting their supply, so retail BYOPC buyers aren't seeing as much stock as they would if supply was higher. Ryzens are still easier to find than GPUs though. I've seen the 3xxx series chips in stock at a few places.

Consoles see a crunch for a month or two and then are usually available: this means some of those early buyers might have paid more than MSRP, while most other people won't. People can find alternatives or wait a bit in this case.