NVIDIA is reportedly looking to reduce orders for 5 nm wafers from TSMC as it anticipates a significant drop in demand from both gamers and crypto-currency miners. Miners are flooding the market with used GeForce RTX 30-series graphics cards, which gamers are all too happy to buy, affecting NVIDIA's sales to both segments of the market. Before the crypto-currency crash of Q1-2022, NVIDIA had projected good sales of its next-generation GeForce GPUs, and prospectively placed orders for a large allocation of 5 nm wafers from TSMC. The company had switched back over to TSMC from Samsung, which makes 8 nm GPUs from the RTX 30-series.

With NVIDIA changing its mind on 5 nm orders, it is at the mercy of TSMC, which has made those allocations (and now faces a loss). It's incumbent on NVIDIA to find a replacement customer for the 5 nm volumes it wants to back out from. Chiakokhua (aka Retired Engineer), interpreted a DigiTimes article originally written in Chinese, which says that NVIDIA has made pre-payments to TSMC for its 5 nm allocation, and now wants to withdraw from some of it. TSMC is unwilling to budge—it could at best hold off shipments by a quarter to Q1-2023, allowing NVIDIA to get the market to digest inventory of 8 nm GPUs; and NVIDIA is responsible for finding replacement customers for the cancelled allocation.