Zotac sounds the alarm on ‘the survival of graphics card manufacturers’
The graphics card industry, like the broader space of PCs, mobile devices, and just about anything else that relies on memory chips, is going through a tough time. It appears that cards with large amounts of video RAM and relatively low prices are becoming difficult to find, although Nvidia and its partners are reassuring themselves. Zotac, a Singapore-based expansion card maker, is less optimistic.
On the official Zotac store for Korea, an alarming message was posted to customers regarding the price increases. “The current situation is extremely serious, serious enough to raise concerns about the very survival of graphics card manufacturers and distributors,” according to a translator who posted on Twitter/X (spotted by PC Gamer). Google’s machine translation worded it slightly differently: “The current situation is serious enough to cause concern for the existence of graphics card manufacturers and distributors in the future.” »
The representative added that “a stable supply in the future may no longer be feasible. […] Not only has the price of the RTX 5090 increased sharply, but the price hike for the 5060 is also substantial.
Consumer graphics cards, especially high-performance models with lots of video memory, are taking a double whammy. The construction of “AI” data centers is gobbling up all the memory chip production on the market, causing RAM prices to skyrocket and also affecting GPU production. At the same time, GPUs are also one of the most efficient ways to run “AI” computing functions, so Nvidia and its OEM partners appear to be prioritizing high-profit industrial graphics cards over consumer models.
Earlier this month, an Asus representative was quoted as saying that the company had canceled production of the RTX 5070 Ti, which is considered the best value in the series with its powerful GPU and 16GB of video RAM. Asus quickly walked back that statement, but the 5070 Ti, 5060 Ti 16GB, and 5090 remain incredibly hard to find, with resellers charging up to double retail prices. Nvidia has reportedly prioritized the 5080 (with 16GB of memory like the 5070 Ti, but 30% more expensive with its slightly faster CPU, memory bandwidth, and more CUDA cores), but even that card is expected to increase in price.
Add-on card makers like Asus, Gigabyte, and MSI will likely be able to weather this kind of storm because they have other product lines to fall back on. But Zotac is a much smaller company, spun off from V-Tech in the ’90s. It only sells graphics cards, mini PCs, and a relatively small line of industrial workstations, as well as the Zone handheld. All of these products will have to take into account more expensive memory. The company’s alarming concerns about the “survival” or “existence” of small manufacturers are not exaggerated.
