(rumor)
https://videocardz.com/newz/nvidia-reportedly-resumes-the-production-of-geforce-rtx-3080-12gb-gpus-after-stopping-it-2-months-ago A hardware leaker with good contacts at board partners claims that NVIDIA is now producing RTX 3080 12GB SKU again after stopping it two months ago.
The RTX 3080 12GB was one of the latest models released this year in January. This card was a cosmetic upgrade over the original model with 10GB, but was a needed refresh of the GA102 GPU at the time. The RTX 3090 series were simply too expensive. Fast forward to August this year, NVIDIA is facing a huge inventory problem with RTX 30 series, there are simply too many cards to sell and too few customers interested in buying a high-end card just 2 months away from next-gen launch. But as NVIDIA produces more RTX 3090 cards with nearly full GA102 GPU, the company is also getting partially disabled GPUs, which may end up in SKUs such as RTX 3080 Ti or RTX 3080 10/12GB models. According to MEGAsizeGPU, NVIDIA has just started making RTX 3080 12GB cards again. The reason supposedly being the huge stock of GA102 GPUs.
NVIDIA can make RTX 3080 12GB cards regardless if the GA102 inventory has enough suitable chips or not. We have seen this many times, when the company repurposed its higher-end GPUs for other models, simply to continue the production of more affordable SKUs. This may lead to lower profits, but NVIDIA will get rid of the GA102 stock one way or the other. The RTX 3080 12GB features 8960 CUDA cores (+256 over the original), an increased memory size to 12GB and wider memory bus of 320-bit. Interestingly, NVIDIA never announced the MSRP for this card.
This info is rumor, but it would make perfect sense if there is an oversupply of chips.