Graphics Card Price Hikes Set to Strike the Retail Shelf in 2nd Half of 2024 as Rising Video Memory Costs Increase Wholesale Prices for AMD and NVIDIA
As per the Japanese publication Gazlog, the rising cost of video memory, largely fueled by demand in datacenters in late fall, is expected to cause another price hike wave of graphics hardware. Since GPU makers bundle their graphic processors and memory chips together as a kit to their board partners, wholesale prices are subject to global memory price movements. Early on, there was a 3x rise, from 2.5 dollars to 7.5 dollars a gigabyte, in spot memory pricing, and prices will keep climbing through the remainder of the year, according to Silicon Motion CEO Wallace Kou These factors have spurred a second retail pricing wave based on a wholesale increase in production prices.
The wholesale increases will come sooner for AMD than for NVIDIA. As of today, the MSRP for the Radeon RX 9070 XT starts around 93,000 110,000 yen (approx. $588 $696 USD) and a 10 15% rise in its manufacturing costs would increase prices by several thousands to around 10,000 yen (approx. $63 USD), whereas a 50,000 yen (approx. $316 USD) spike has already hit the high end 5090 at the wholesale level mid May due to the use of pricier GDDR7 technology. Given these trends and predictions for the semiconductor supply shortage to last until 2028, the next course of action should be to get it all before the second wave of retail prices will be upon us.
The manufacturer of Radeon GPUs and processors is about to adjust its wholesale pricing structure and increase its wholesale cost for the bundles by about 10 15% per unit in the third quarter, beginning as early as July.
This adjustment will lead to consumer price increases, especially at the mid to high end of the consumer market, which will translate to some significant mark ups for products featuring larger memory capacities, like those at the 93,000 110,000 yen (approx. $588 $696 USD) mark, on your typical shelf space.
