It's a familiar story by now. With Samsung reportedly increasing its DRAM prices by around 20 percent for the ongoing quarter, NVIDIA felt it had no choice but to raise the prices of its consumer graphics cards, constituting the third such inflationary episode so far this year, one that has purportedly emptied store shelves as distributors enter a full-on panic mode.
Unlike NVIDIA's price hike in May, the current inflationary episode has reportedly impacted a lot more consumer-facing graphics card models, spurring empty store shelves as rumors ran rampant
According to Taiwan's Economic Daily, NVIDIA has increased the prices of its consumer facing graphics cards by between 20 percent and 30 percent.
This follows a price increase of between 10 percent and 15 percent that NVIDIA implemented back in January 2026. However, the price hike in May only focused on high-end cards such as the GeForce RTX 5090 series. This means that the latest price hikes constitute NVIDIA's third such inflationary episode this year.
What's more, according to the publication BenchLife, NVIDIA's price-related notices to its downstream supply chain partners now pertain to entire GPU bundles, spanning not just the GPU itself but the GDDR memory as well.
These notices, coupled with rampant rumors, have reportedly unleashed full-blown panic among retail channel distributors, with a major Chinese e-commerce platform going so far as to de-shelve many mainstream NVIDIA graphics cards last week.
Some retailers who have adjusted their prices are predictably showing a sizable differential. For instance, the 16GB GDDR7 NVIDIA RTX 5070 Ti graphics card is now retailing for 10,700 Yuan ($1,581) vs. its price of 9,299 Yuan ($1,374) last week, and 7,200 Yuan ($1,064) in November 2025.
These price hikes are also producing aberrant outcomes in the GDDR sphere. Consider the fact that the standard 2GB GDDR7 video memory now sells for $20, but a 3GB one retails for anywhere between $60 and $70. This means that the 3GB GDDR7 chip offers just 50 percent more video memory but costs over 3x as much!
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