(Bridget Bennett/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Don't expect PC graphics card pricing to come down in the near term. Nvidia is warning that supplies remain “very tight” amid the ongoing memory shortage.
On Wednesday, the company reported earnings for fiscal Q4, which ended on Jan. 25 and covered the holiday sales period. On the bright side, Nvidia’s revenue for its gaming business increased by 47% year-over-year. However, gaming sales decreased 13% quarter over quarter.
In her report, Nvidia CFO Colette Kress added: “We expect supply constraints to be a headwind to gaming in the first quarter of fiscal 2027 and beyond.”
In a subsequent earnings call, an investor asked if Nvidia’s gaming business can “still grow year-over-year,” despite the memory shortage.
“As much as we would love to have...more supply, we do believe for a couple quarters, it is going to be very tight,” Kress said. “If things improve by the end of the year, there is an opportunity to think about what this is from a year-over-year growth, but it’s still too early for us to know at this time.”
That doesn’t bode well for PC builders. But it isn’t a surprise since both analysts and memory suppliers have been warning for weeks now that the AI-driven memory shortage is expected to persist into next year. The shortage is so bad that The Information reports that Nvidia might delay the next-generation RTX 6000 series into 2028, meaning consumers wouldn’t see a new GPU generation over a relatively long three-year stretch.
In the meantime, the shortage has inflated pricing for Nvidia’s higher-tier graphics cards, including the RTX 5080 and RTX 5070 Ti, which can now cost $200 to $500 more than their original MSRPs. Despite the situation, Nvidia's earnings continue to set new records, as the company prioritizes chip sales to feed the AI data center rush. In fiscal Q4, the company's data center revenue reached a whopping $62.3 billion, while gaming revenue was $3.7 billion.