Expect short supplies and more price hikes, say Zotac Korea

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun

The Korean arm of graphics card, mini PC, and handheld producers Zotac have shared an assessment of the ongoing memory shortage crisis that makes for bleak reading – even by RAMnarök standards. In a seemingly legitimate post on their Korean retail site, spotted and translated by TXiXXeR user harukaze5719, Zotac Korea write that "The current situation is extremely serious – serious enough to raise concerns about the very survival of graphics card manufacturers and distributors going forward."

To recap, and you can imagine me desperately sobbing while doing do, memory chips and the components they’re used in – which span RAM sticks, SSDs, and graphics cards – are being traded en masse by tech companies planning to build large-scale architecture for AI products. This has caused both a shortage and ballooning prices, especially on the home PC side of the hardware business, with some consumer brands running out of stock or shutting down entirely.

Zotac, or at least someone at Zotac Korea, evidently fears the same fate. harukaze5719’s translation, which broadly matches my own machine translations of the post, adds that "Memory supply remains constrained, and it has been announced that GPU supply volumes will also be reduced.

"In addition, several models are expected to be unavailable for an extended period of time."

The post then notes that prices of Nvidia graphics processors, from the RTX 5090 to the RTX 5060, have suffered "substantial" price hikes, which will in turn drive up the end costs of their fully-built graphics cards. Zotac’s UK representatives have not yet responded to a request for comment.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun

The GPU industry has endured shortages before; back in 2020 and 2021, when we all thought crypto mining was the worst thing that could happen to PC components, waiting lists for GeForce cards ran into the months. But then, even with the manufacturing difficulties posed by Covid, much of that scarcity was down to finished cards being insta-bought as soon as they appeared in retailers, so everyone involved still got paid. Component shortages caused by a lack of the memory chips needed to build them are a different problem, and one that consumer-facing hardware companies are struggling to find an answer for.

It’s all terrible, basically. Not everyone is so pessimistic: Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan, whose outfit rely on GPU, RAM, and SSD supplies for their Blade laptop series, recently expressed a belief that prices would come down naturally. But then, Razer’s big reveal as CES was a captive AI anime woman in a box, which seems like a worse display of judgement than doomposting on the company retail account.