Yes, the chip shortage must be preventing the manufacture of enough ASICs. The same can be said for Ethereum. The shortage of GPUs is preventing the difficulty

Yes, the chip shortage must be preventing the manufacture of enough ASICs. The same can be said for Ethereum. The shortage of GPUs is preventing the difficulty to raise fast enough. The profit margin has been like 5-10x the electricity cost for the last few months. If you bought a RTX 3080/3090 it would have paid itself and the electricity by now.