All talk about the effect of mining on GPU prices but nothing is ever mentioned about driverless car development on the demand for GPU’s, surely this is also having an effect on demand supply and pricing?
Those GPU's, if you can call them GPU's, would have never entered the GPU marketplace anyway so you can ignore them as such... What they would do however is use memory, mainly, that could be used for GPU manufacture when there is a shortage of memory at the moment - which in itself increases costs. Those also would have long term supply contracts and would have been fabricated in addition to the normal projected demand for ordinary GPU's.
The main reason there is price increases, and price gouging, is, mainly, an unforeseen increase in demand for them. That coupled with memory being artificially limited by a cartel to ramp up prices and an unwillingness for manufacturers to risk producing more than forecast, especially this close to end-of-life, goes someway to explain currant prices.