According to The Information websiteGet the messageDue to the continued explosive growth in demand for AI data center computing power, coupled with a severe shortage of critical memory, NVIDIA has reportedly postponed the release of the updated RTX 50 series (widely predicted to be the RTX 50 Super series), originally scheduled for 2026. This means that NVIDIA may not release any new graphics cards for the consumer gaming market this year, marking the first time in 30 years that NVIDIA has not released any new gaming graphics card products for an entire year.
AI gets the lion's share, while players get the scraps? Profit margins determine everything.
The report points out that the core reason NVIDIA made this decision is very practical: profitability.
With the increasing prevalence of generative AI, the demand for high-end AI acceleration chips in data centers has been virtually constant. AI acceleration chips boast profit margins as high as 65%, compared to only about 40% for gaming graphics cards. Therefore, given limited production capacity, prioritizing resources for the high-profit AI business is a logical business decision.
The data also corroborates NVIDIA's shift in focus:
• The first nine months of 2022:Gaming GPUs contribute 35% of total revenue.
• The first nine months of 2025:The gaming business has shrunk significantly, now accounting for only 8%.
Memory shortage became the final straw
Besides profit considerations, bottlenecks in the component supply chain are also a key factor. Current AI chips are extremely reliant on high bandwidth memory (HBM), leading to a significant shift in global memory production capacity towards HBM products, which in turn squeezes out the production capacity of GDDR display memory needed for consumer graphics cards.
This "memory crisis" has not only affected the PC industry, but also the automotive electronics industry. With memory chips becoming both more expensive and scarcer, NVIDIA is clearly unwilling to "waste" wafer and memory quotas on the low-profit gaming graphics card business.
RTX 60 series may be delayed as well.
The impact of this strategic shift extends beyond the cancellation of this year's RTX 50 Super. The report further points out that NVIDIA's next-generation architecture-designed consumer graphics cards (tentatively called the RTX 60 series), originally expected to enter mass production by the end of 2027, are also facing delays for the same reason.
This means that the RTX 50 series currently on the market may have an "extremely long standby time" and will continue to be the market leader for a long time to come.
