ASUS ROG STRIX RTX 3090

My take on the flow of this situation would be as follows:

1. Silica shortage (not your average backyard sand, but pure silica) leading to manufacturing shortages across the entire industry worldwide: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191108-why-the-world-is-running-out-of-sand (November of 2019), https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/05/sand-shortage-the-world-is-running-out-of-a-crucial-commodity.html (March of 2021)
2. Market Prioritization. Products used in consumer application is often cutdown and derived from higher-tier markets. For the context of computers, our gaming-grade graphics cards and processors are cutdown from their HPC counterparts. The RTX 3090 and 3080 for example are cutdown from the RTX A6000 and A40 class of cards, sharing the same GA102 GPU core. Silicon is often offered to the HPC industry first before it trickles down to our general consumer industry, so we have to wait for the components that weren't quite strong enough to become A6000/A40's to be "cutdown" into A6000's and A40's. Since the industry is facing a shortage, that process is impacted as a result.
3. Distribution & Logistics Issues. Assembling components in the middle of a worldwide material shortage compounded by a pandemic is difficult enough, even more so when the same pandemic impacts international shipping. Flights were grounded in many countries, additional screening measures added on shipments into and out of countries, coupled with shipping companies being unable to meet with the surge in shipping demand from those now working at home and not wanting to risk doing their shopping in-store. All of this, while trying to maintain social distancing practices themselves and staffing to meet the demand, it's quite the nightmare scenario.
4. Pandemic Induced Demand. This one couldn't have come at a worse possible time. We saw the silica shortage coming back in 2019, but to have everyone working at home and in direct access to their PC's and gaming devices, being barred from their usual outdoor activities looking for new outlets for entertainment? No doubt this lead to a significant increase in demand for GPU's and new technology in general. Remember, there isn't just a GPU shortage going on, car manufacturers are competing for the same silica: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-56841946
5. Scalpers & Bots. As we've seen throughout history, not everyone acts altruistically in times of need and instead look for opportunities to profit. They've existed far longer than hardware shortages and will likely exist beyond this shortage as well.
6. Tariffs. I won't get into political discussion, but tariffs do play a role in product pricing and it couldn't have hit at a worse time. It took a while for the impact to trickle down to hit consumers, but when it did, it was significant: https://www.pcmag.com/news/with-tariffs-back-in-place-gpu-vendors-evga-zotac-raise-prices-on-graphics, https://www.tomshardware.com/news/gpu-tariff-asus-priceincrease

With all of that said, I don't believe that manufacturers are willingly decreasing production to inflate their own pricing. Doing so would risk their market share which is far more valuable to them than making a few extra hundred dollars on what limited number of cards they are selling. Remember, Microsoft sold the Xbox consoles at a loss just to gain the valuable market share. Companies want to be able to say "Our product is in the hands of X% of customers around the world", and they can't do that if they are shooting themselves in the foot by restricting the very product consumers want. I just think it's a combination of some very unfortunate events that brought about a terrible situation all around.

As for the phone number issue, I can say that our tech support team can still be reached at 614-850-3670. In fact, I'd recommend texting that number as you'll likely get a quicker response due to the increased phone queue volume. As for chat not working, this would be the first that I've heard of that, though I can pass that along to the supervisors of our tech support team.

Part of the reason why we have this community forum is that we have actual customers sharing information and helping each other out. I, for example, am operating out of our corporate office and can't really provide any information from an in-store level, but customers that are at the stores would be able to help update each other on their experience with the lines, what they see as far as product availability is concerned, and provide crucial feedback to one another.

I get that everyone is frustrated over this GPU shortage situation, throw my name in the hat among that very same group of people, but there won't be much that can be done about it until the world gets back into a normal rhythm. Until then, we'll work to improve our processes and we are still open to suggestions to improve. Discussions are going on every single day to improve our processes and to get everyone the product they are looking for, it's just a matter of time before things eventually work out.

After checking into this further, our chat software is working properly with each browser we test without third party add-ons. It appears Ghostery may block chat windows by default, as users report on their github page https://github.com/ghostery/ghostery-extension/issues/550 and I see this same question coming up on other websites.

If you do not wish to disable that, you are more than welcome to send an email through our contact forms regarding online sales at https://www.microcenter.com/site/customer-support/customer_support_contact_form.aspx or email tech support questions about a Micro Center purchase at https://www.mctsol.com/newtechsupport_form.php