According to a new report, both AMD and Nvidia will raise the prices of their consumer GPUs “significantly” this year. If this report is true, both companies will have pushed these price hikes by next month.
This information comes from Newsis, which claims these price hikes will come as a result of the high cost of memory in the computer hardware market right now. This increased cost has been caused by construction of widespread AI data centres, which has resulted in a huge demand for such components.
This price hike will continue to get worse too, according to Newsis industry sources. While an initial price increase will reportedly go into place in January for AMD and February for Nvidia, both companies will continue gradually increasing the price throughout the year.
Expectations are that these price increases will impact certain GPUs, including Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 50 series and AMD’s Radeon RX 9000 series which are already expensive. According to Newsis, the Nvidia RTX 5090 which was released at a price point of $1,999 could eventually increase to $5,000 this year.
The reasons why these price hikes are coming are clear. Not only are GPus getting more expensive to make due to the increased cost of construction, but AI companies such as OpenAI are hardware guzzling behemoths. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang stated that next generation AI will need “100 times more compute” than older models, and Microsoft’s CEO mused that they don’t have the electricity to install the GPUs sitting in their inventory.
Whether or not you buy into the hype regarding Generative AI and LLMs, the reality is these companies are buying GPUs (and RAM) with the expectation that they’ll need an absurd amount of hardware for future models, and the consumer demand for those models. Thus, we have a massive demand for GPUs, thus the price increase. Nvidia and AMD know they can charge AI companies more too, as these companies rely on such hardware for continued growth.
What this means for the average consumer of PC parts for gaming purposes is that your PC parts are going to get drastically more expensive over the coming months if this report is accurate, and they’ll likely get more expensive due to basic supply / demand problems in the hardware market.
All the while video game companies state their intention to embrace AI through development. Take Square Enix, which intends to replace 70% of its QA wit hAI by 2027, and Ubisoft whose CEO believes AI will be as big a revolution as the shift to 3D.