The horizon for the gaming industry continues to darken with yet more news regarding the impact of the current memory shortage. By now its no secret that there’s an ongoing shortage of memory chips due to manufacturers prioritizing orders for AI datacenters. Rather than a trickle-down effect, it has become more of a near cut-off of supplies for consumer products, leading to astronomical price increases, and is said to only worsen for the next couple of years. Ironically enough, NVIDIA, the biggest forerunner of AI, is reportedly slowing production of some of its GPUs due to this shortage.
According to a report from China’s BoBantang (via Benchlife), NVIDIA plans to cut production of its current GPU lineup by up to 30-40% in the coming year. It’s said that some of its partners have already gotten word that the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti and GeForce RTX 5070 Ti are to be the first products affected. Both cards use 16 GB GDDR7, and NVIDIA is likely trying to re-allocate the VRAM for other, more profitable models. However, another side effect that could happen is that this move could redirect gamers on a budget to reconsider the 8 GB version of the RTX 5060 Ti, a model that was not viewed as being very relevant for modern gaming in 2025.
“In addition to the news from BoBantang, several AIC partners and component suppliers have also mentioned to us that NVIDIA will be the first to adjust the supply of GeForce RTX 5070 Ti and GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB GDDR7”
-Benchlife
As if this news isn’t bad enough, more was shared last month via hardware information leaker Golden Pig Upgrade (via Tom’s Hardware) that NVIDIA is reportedly examining another strategy to cut its costs. NVIDIA is said to be considering no longer providing its partners with VRAM. This means that partners such as MSI, ASUS, and GIGABYTE would need to procure memory for their graphics cards, which would assuredly cause a spectrum of prices for consumers never seen before. It also means the smaller companies might not be able to survive, given that the larger companies are likely to already have better channel support and thus be able to secure VRAM, leaving those who do not without supply alternatives.
“Previously, Nvidia monopolized both the GPU cores and memory for its AICs (Add-in-Card) partners. Now, it’s rumored online that Nvidia only supplies cores, while AICs are forced to source their own memory. For smaller AICs who didn’t have prior connections, trying to negotiate memory business is now completely ignored; it’s essentially like they’re no longer needed in the graphics card business.”
-Golden Pig Upgrade
There’s a lot of speculation regarding NVIDIA’s plans for 2026. Aside from what’s been mentioned here, it’s also been said that NVIDIA could delay the launch of its RTX 50 series refresh, aka SUPER series. NVIDIA has said nothing regarding the RTX 50 SUPER series, which is rumored to be the 5070 SUPER, 5070 Ti SUPER, and 5080 SUPER, but NVIDIA may still yet announce these GPUs at CES 26.