Zotac claims the 'very survival of graphics card manufacturers' is at risk thanks to the state of the market right now

It can be easy for us consumers and PC gamers to think we're the only victims of the memory shortage and resultant high prices. But in fact plenty of companies are scrambling to pick up whatever scraps the AI industry leaves behind, too. If we need a clear reminder of this, Zotac Korea has just given us a warning about how serious the situation is for the company and graphics cards in general.

The company just announced on its website that "the current situation is extremely serious—serious enough to raise concerns about the very survival of graphics card manufacturers and distributors going forward." That's according to X user and tech talker harukaze5719's translation, which aligns pretty closely with Google's machine translation.

The company claims that not only has the price of the RTX 5090 "increased sharply", but also for the RTX 5060. Presumably it's referring to the price the company is paying Nvidia for the GPUs. Because of these increased prices, Zotac Korea is cutting its rewards points policy.

The AI-induced memory shortage is, of course, most clearly pertinent to RAM, but it's also pertinent to GPUs because these also use memory, this being GDDR video memory. If there's a general shortage of DRAM, this will affect anything and everything that uses it, including GPUs.

Plus there's the simple fact that Nvidia can either turn its share of TSMC's output, the company actually making the chips, into consumer GPUs or AI accelerators. So if the AI industry is getting the lion's share, gaming chips will lose out.

This announcement comes just a few days after reports that Zotac seems to have raised prices for many of its graphics cards. It's also just a few days after word spread that Nvidia might have cancelled its cashback program that incentivised AIB partners such as Zotac to sell at MSRP. If this is true, it seems like it's Nvidia essentially telling its AIB partners that RTX 50-series pricing is entirely market-dictated, now, and old MSRPs mean little.

The timing would certainly make sense: Nvidia allegedly cancels this cashback incentive program and Zotac is left to bear the entire brunt of market prices for the GPU and its memory, which are of course high right now, and so it raises GPU prices across the board and issues this statement. That's all speculation, of course, as we don't even know for certain whether there was such an incentive program, let alone whether its cancellation is the cause of Zotac's concerns, but it would make sense.

It also tracks with what we've heard for a long while: that margins are very slim for AIB graphics card manufacturers. That is, remember, the reason EVGA gave for it ceasing making graphics cards altogether a few years ago.

In its announcement, Zotac explains that because memory supply is "constrained", so too is the GPU supply, and "several models are expected to be unavailable for an extended period of time."

Interestingly, Zotac notes that "there are growing concerns that, aside from GPUs manufactured by Samsung, stable supply going forward may no longer be feasible."

What's interesting here is that Samsung caveat. Older GPUs like the RTX 30-series are (were) made in Samsung foundries, but newer GPUs like the RTX 40-series and 50-series are made by TSMC. Zotac might seem to be suggesting that TSMC is the bottleneck, here, but of course it's Nvidia that decides how to allocate its share of production capacity—for AI chips or for gaming GPUs.

All more sunny stuff to kick off 2026, right? At least we have a fantastic new mobile chip from Intel to be happy about. This time last year I certainly wasn't counting on Intel being the company to bring some hope for PC gaming hardware, but here we are.

Best graphics card 2026

1. Best overall: AMD Radeon RX 9070

2. Best value: AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT 16 GB

3. Best budget: Intel Arc B570

4. Best mid-range: Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti

5. Best high-end: Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090

👉Check out our full graphics card guide👈