But exact price increases, should they come to pass, remain unconfirmed.
(Image credit: Asus)
Last week, the first rumors emerged that AMD was considering increasing recommended prices of its graphics cards in response to climbing prices of GDDR6 memory. Today, a leak by @harukaze5719 on X/Twitter could indicate the magnitude of the increase that AMD is planning to implement. If the rumor holds true, the company could increase recommended prices of its Radeon RX graphics cards with 8GB of memory by $20 and graphics boards with 16GB of memory by $40. The information is strictly unofficial, but may have some merit if we look at market trends.
8GB of GDDR6 memory was priced around $19.54 ($2.443 per 8 Gb chip) on the spot market on July 1, 2025, according to DRAMeXchange. The spot price of 8GB of GDDR6 today, December 2, is around $31.52 ($3.94 per 8 Gb chip), an increase of 61% in less than half of a year. Prices of 16 Gb GDDR6 memory ICs aren't as easy to find, but normally they should be about two times more expensive than their 8 Gb counterparts, which means that it costs over $62 to equip a graphics card with 16GB of GDDR6.
An avid reader may argue that as a large consumer of GDDR memories, AMD purchases memory in large volumes on long-term contracts, which smooths out sudden price changes. Yet the volumes of GDDR6 memory that AMD is likely to buy for graphics cards aren't that large these days: the company sold 740,000 discrete graphics processors for desktops in Q1, followed by 700,000 units in Q2 and 840,000 standalone GPUs for desktops in Q3, based on data from Jon Peddie Research. Getting huge discounts is hard if you do not buy a lot.
Furthermore, since we are dealing with a structural DRAM market change and as leading producers of memory clearly allocate more of their capacity for HBM memory aimed at AI accelerators, commodity DRAMs like GDDR6 are poised to get more expensive.
If it comes to pass, this rumor highlights the growing pressures that the AI boom is placing on the entire industry. AMD likely chose GDDR6 memory over GDDR7 for the RX 9000 series in part to control costs by maximizing its GDDR6 volumes (its Xbox and PS5 SoCs also use GDDR6), but the skyrocketing AI demand for silicon right now means there ultimately isn't any escape from rising costs.
These pressures also aren't isolated to AMD. Other rumblings suggest that Nvidia could move away from the business model of selling GPU packages and GDDR memories as a set to board partners altogether. We usually think of HBM as the memory type of choice for AI accelerators, but each Rubin CPX GPU requires 128GB of GDDR7, and if that memory could go on a high-margin AI accelerator rather than a lower-margin consumer graphics card, it's not hard to understand why Nvidia would prioritize furthering its AI lead.
AMD's current lineup includes Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 with 16 GB of memory ($599 and $549), the Radeon RX 9070 GRE with 12 GB, Radeon RX 9060 XT with 8GB or 16GB ($299 and $399), and a Radeon RX 9060 with 8GB that is designed primarily for OEMs. Increasing MSRPs of AMD's existing Radeon RX 9000-series products by $20 to $40 will hardly make them substantially more expensive and therefore less competitive, as Nvidia's relatively high MSRPs for its Blackwell cards leave some wiggle room for AMD to adjust its own sticker prices while remaining competitive. But at the same time, no increases go unnoticed in today's market.
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Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.
