Nvidia warns of constrained supply of gaming GPUs, potentially signaling higher prices and shortages to come — 'we do believe for a couple of quarters it is going to be very tight'
But who is to blame?
The chief executive of Nvidia warned that the supply of gaming graphics cards will be tight in the first half of the company's fiscal year, and it has limited visibility for the second half of the year. Given the short supply of gaming graphics cards for desktops and gaming GPUs for laptops, expect gaming hardware to come at elevated prices.
"As much as we would love to have more supply, we do believe for a couple of quarters it is going to be very tight," said Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, during the company's earnings call with financial analysts and investors. "If things improve by the end of the year, there is an opportunity to think about what that is from a year-over-year growth, but it is still too early for us to know at this time. We will get back to you as soon as we can."
The head of Nvidia did not elaborate whether the tight supply of gaming hardware will be a result of insufficient supply of actual graphics processors, as Nvidia diverts its reserved wafer fabrication capacity at TSMC from gaming GPUs to more lucrative data center AI GPUs, or a result of insufficient supply of GDDR7 memory as DRAM makers choose to produce silicon-intensive and expensive HBM3E over GDDR7 SGRAM.
Sales of graphics processing units (GPUs) for gaming and professional visualization applications brought Nvidia $19.233 billion last fiscal year as the company sold $16.042 billion worth of GeForce graphics processors (up 41% compared to FY2025) and $3.191 billion worth of professional graphics solutions (up 70% year-over-year).
Prices of graphics cards for desktop computers have been increasing for some time. Despite this, demand for GeForce graphics boards last year was stronger than in 2024 and 2023 as Nvidia ramped up production of its GeForce RTX 50-series GPUs based on the Blackwell architecture.
While we still have yet to see how many Blackwell GPUs for gaming Nvidia shipped in calendar 2025, based on data from Jon Peddie Research, Nvidia shipped approximately 30.4 million desktop GPUs in the first three quarters of 2025, which is around 200 thousand more than the 30.2 million desktop GPUs the company sold through the whole of 2024. Typically, unit sales of gaming GPUs for laptops tend to match unit sales of gaming GPUs for desktops. By contrast, shipments of AMD's Radeon graphics cards for desktops dropped dramatically last year.
In any case, the chief exec of Nvidia has warned gamers about a short supply of graphics cards in the coming quarters, which almost certainly means high prices and limited choice.
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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.
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hotaru251 Reply"As much as we would love to have more supply, we do believe for a couple of quarters it is going to be very tight,
divert chips from ai to gaming and you could help issue but you choose not to as you only care about profit not the people who made you what you are
edit: forgot a word so added it to make actual sense -
User of Computers Reply
Objectively this is incorrect, assuming when you say "chips" you mean A100, H100/200, B200 (which are all slowly failing lol), or B300. They lack the hardware to output to a display, and as such are useless for gaming workloads.hotaru251 said:divert chips from ai to gaming and you could help issue but you choose not to as you only care about profit not the people who made you what you are
Also, did you really expect a company to care about anything except making money? And if so, why the naïveté? -
ohio_buckeye Honestly I think right now if you’re a gamer on a budget, one of the best cards right now is a used 3080. The 10gb models are all over eBay and can be had at 300-350 which isn’t great but probably at least 5060 performance maybe a bit better. Should still be decent at 1440p.Reply -
RemmRun eh, goes up and down. Wait if you want budget prices, or pay. Glad I upgraded about 14 months ago.Reply -
hotaru251 Reply
...i meant the wafers.User of Computers said:Objectively this is incorrect, assuming when you say "chips" you mean A100, H100/200, B200 (which are all slowly failing lol), or B300. They lack the hardware to output to a display, and as such are useless for gaming workloads.
The actual part that limits amount that can be produced.
nvidia puts most wafers for their serve/ai customers as its more profitable now.
they coudl easily just shift wafer production ratio to have mroe for the gaming consumer side and help fix issue given we have seen the amount of gpu's being sold en mass. -
vanadiel007 There is no shortage. They are simply diverting their production capacity to AI chips as they generate more revenue.Reply
This will eventually blow up though as AI in it's current form is not sustainable, and I don't see the next form (AGI) happening any time soon if ever.
Then they will be back with great "deals" for gamers. I suggest to remember this when you purchase your next GPU. -
Ogotai Reply
and most will still buy nvidia, regardless...vanadiel007 said:I suggest to remember this when you purchase your next GPU.