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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