NVIDIA has announced a third price increase for consumer graphics cards this year. With recent reports indicating that prices for key products have risen by up to 30%, combined with DRAM price hikes from memory manufacturers like Samsung Electronics and shortages in GDDR7 supply, the distribution industry is now experiencing widespread product shortages.
According to Taiwan's Economic Daily and IT media Benchlife on the 30th, NVIDIA recently raised prices for consumer graphics cards by 20% to 30%. This follows earlier increases of 10% to 15% in January and a price hike in May for high-performance products such as the GeForce RTX 5090 series, marking the third price adjustment this year.
Unlike the May increase, which was limited to top-tier products like the RTX 5090, the latest price hike has been expanded to include major consumer product lines, including the RTX 5070 series. As news of the price increases spread, distributors began securing inventory, and some regions have already reported shortages of key graphics cards.
Benchlife reported that NVIDIA's price adjustment notice sent to distributors applies to the entire package, including GPUs (graphics processing units) and GDDR (Graphics Double Data Rate) memory. GDDR is high-speed graphics memory installed in GPUs, responsible for handling large volumes of data required for gaming and AI computations. With both GPU and GDDR memory prices rising, it is analyzed that manufacturers of graphics cards are facing increased production costs.
The market also attributes the price increase to Samsung Electronics' recent DRAM price hike. According to industry sources, Samsung Electronics raised DRAM prices by approximately 20% this quarter. The surge in demand for HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) for AI servers, combined with strong pricing in general-purpose DRAM, is believed to have driven up graphics memory prices as well.
The price increases are already being reflected in the market. In China, the selling price of the GeForce RTX 5070 Ti equipped with 16GB GDDR7 memory rose by about 15% from 9,299 yuan last week to 10,170 yuan currently. Compared to the November 2023 price of 7,200 yuan, this represents an increase of approximately 49%.
GDDR prices are also surging sharply. Currently, 2GB GDDR7 memory is traded at around $20, while 3GB products are sold for $60 to $70. Although the memory capacity has increased by 50%, the price is more than three times higher, indicating a deepening shortage of GDDR7 supply.
Industry experts believe that with continued demand for AI server memory and ongoing GDDR7 shortages, the situation will not be resolved in the near term. Consequently, it is expected that the trend of rising consumer graphics card prices and supply constraints will persist for some time.
in TECH
