Early this year, the shortage of microchips was announced, causing a delay in the production of various kinds of technology. 

This sudden change of course has caused distress in various industries as it limits their ability to produce items including car engines and graphics processing units, or GPU (a specialized processor that controls the images and videos on digital screens).

“There’s just a lot of demand for [semiconductor chips] right now and not enough supply especially in this COVID environment,”  Financial Analyst from Facebook, Dylan Cheng said. 

With the transition to remote work, the growing necessity of technology like computers and phones has skyrocketed the demand for these parts. Education systems have also been struggling to provide laptops to their students to assist with their academic career. 

The creation of it is lacking as, “[the company] is missing resources like the raw materials needed to build out these chips.”

Despite the ongoing  manufacturing of these products,  “It’s harder to predict when you’re going to get your products from the factory,” Service Engineer, Jonathan Chang said. 

The lack of labor and the global effects of COVID has caused the arrival of deliveries to be  spontaneous as Chang shares, “Things could arrive a lot later and there’s a lot of factors involved”

These factors, including the pandemic, have contributed to the delay of shipments and products affecting the service lines further down the production line. Together, these changes have caused the general public to notice the lack of resources. The technology that was once unlimited to them has suddenly become scarce with a reduced production rate.

 “We’ve taken them for granted in recent years, because what we haven’t realized is that they take months to process,”  junior William Widjaja said. 

Despite how miniature and insignificant the problem may have appeared, it has affected various communities as a whole: gaming, educators, corporate workers, and more.

Bids as high as $1.6 thousand dominate the online bidding industry as sellers on Ebay begin to take advantage of the low supply to make a bang for their buck. This limits the people who wants to purchase a GPU due to their high prices, especially since the gaming community is build around teenagers with limited budgets.

Technology has grown with the society, but now that a crucial part to it has fallen behind, the state of the economy remains in question.