According to Hardware Times, Nvidia is set to pay the exorbitant amount of nearly $10 billion to secure its share of TSMC 5nm capacity. Nvidia is geared up to produce its next generation Ada Lovelace GPU on TSMC's N5 node. This next gen GPU family is likely to be referred to as the RTX 40 series. No one outside of the management of both companies knows exactly how the fees break down or the timeframe, but as noted by Hardware Times, Nvidia spent $9 billion in just the third quarter on inventory and prepayment for future products. This would indicate that Nvidia is already paying through the nose well in advance.

This is a huge amount of money, but Nvidia needs to make sure that it has its products out there, and TSMC will allow you to jump the queue if you are willing to pay a premium.

The GeForce RTX 4000 series is expected to arrive around September/October this year, and it appears that Nvidia is attempting to avoid any shortages when these new graphics cards arrive.

With so many consumers having basically written off any chance of getting an Nvidia 30XX series GPU, and particularly so with the 40XX series now on the horizon, the last thing Nvidia wants is to release another ‘phantom’ range of graphics cards that everyone wants, but no one can buy.

Of course, there is no proof that all these chips are not going to end up being bought in bulk by Bitcoin miners. Crypto prices have fallen and despite attempts by those invested in the fake currency to talk up their investment signs are that it is going to stay down for a while.