The effects of the ongoing memory and storage chip shortage continue to be seen with SanDisk and are rumored to be causing NVIDIA grief as well. While only a small handful of industry execs are publicly speaking about the shortages, which are said to be caused by the increasing demands of AI usage, the facts are in plain sight as prices skyrocket. The latest price increases come from SanDisk, which, per a report from DigiTimes (via Tom’s Hardware), has raised its contract prices by 50%, triggering ripples across the storage manufacturing sector with other companies such as Innodick, Transcen, and Apacer Technology, all of whom have reportedly paused shipments and are now re-examining current market conditions. According to the report, all three aforementioned companies saw staggering net profits hitting between 70% to 334% YoY but are obviously now working to adjust to increased manufacturing costs.
Meanwhile, an unexpected rumor began circulating last week. This time around, it involves potential GDDR7 memory supply restraints and their effect on GPU manufacturer NVIDIA. If the following rumor is true, it presents an ironic twist of fate since NVIDIA is the world’s largest supplier of AI technology. It’s long been speculated and plausible that NVIDIA would reveal its RTX 50 refresh, aka SUPER, series of GPUs at or around CES 2026. However, the latest rumor suggests that the current chip shortage will delay the NVIDIA RTX 50 SUPERs, unofficially referred to as the 5070 SUPER, 5070 Ti SUPER, and 5080 SUPER, until Q3 2026. The basis of this rumor is that NVIDIA is reportedly using 3 GB GDDR7 modules for the RTX 50 SUPER GPUs, which are now in short supply. The was a post on social media suggesting the refresh lineup had been cancelled, but well-known information leaker MEGAsizeGPU countered this, stating it has not been cancelled and is merely delayed.
No cancellation yet, just delayed. Now planned to launch in 26Q3, previously set to launch in 26Q1. https://t.co/C3RmFv1uIq
— MEGAsizeGPU (@Zed__Wang) November 7, 2025
Folks chomping at the bit to upgrade beyond the RTX 50 series have already been pushing for RTX 60 details, to which MEGAsizeGPU expressed doubt of a 2027 release and that NVIDIA is likely to hang onto the 50 series for a bit longer. Meanwhile, just as NVIDIA is potentially focusing its supply of 3 GB GDDR7 on other products such as the RTX 5090 laptop GPU and RTX PRO “Blackwell” series, a shortage of 2 GB GDDR7 modules could result in lower inventory for the RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB GPU, as it shares the same amount of VRAM as other GPUs further up in the GeForce RTX 50 product stack and NVIDIA may choose allocate that VRAM towards higher profit revenue generating models.
5060 Ti 16G will be in short supply very soon. https://t.co/PA8yslFHKY
— MEGAsizeGPU (@Zed__Wang) November 7, 2025
As if all these if/and or maybe’s were not enough, some folks are now beginning to speculate that current RTX prices, which have only just recently reached MSRP, and in some cases below, will experience renewed price hikes. It’s also been suggested that when the RTX 50 SUPER series does launch, it will be at a higher MSRP than its predecessors, and not lower as sometimes happens.
Discussion (19 replies)
Join Discussion →Wow this is feeling like ram price manipulation.
Can the industry simply agree to ONLY cause grief to Nvidia?
They are the ones behind the shortages in the first place.
I'm tired boss
Yep, and being done in plain sight as well, with the powers that be full on saying, Oh, by the way, we don't have inventory because we sold it all to the big players and so now we have to shaft everyone with price hikes, but don't mind our near-exponential profits that will be locked in for years to come.
Nvidia is a multi Trillion dollar company. Why the hell they don't have a stake in the fab companies out their... like they do Intel. To simply flex and have fabs built and dedicated to their process nodes I simply don't know at this stage.
The blatant market manipulation of shared production is driving up component costs for every other freaking industry because the big dogs are eating all the food at a price far below what anyone else has to pay.
Only way to respond is never to pay for AI services. Let AI companies eat dust!
That won't happen... it's being built into basic services with no increased cost. (Looking at you office 365... ) And to be honest... it IS useful.
I haven't used Office 365 (don't really see a need) but I'm curious to know what it has AI-wise that's worth paying?
Nothing is free. Tomorrow they could segregate the AI features into a more expensive tier of Office 365. If they are currently doing it, it's so they can prepare a generation of workers who cannot live without AI, before putting the squeeze on them.
On paper. I doubt that they can write a cheque for $500B tomorrow if they wanted. Apple has more cash on hand. But even they would rather support TSMC with their business than take on the headache of fabbing. These companies sleep easy because TSMC is doing the worrying of manufacturing for them. It's why Zen 5 IOD is still on 6nm. Not even 5nm. Because those fabs gotta pay themselves out before they can be dismantled or upgraded.
Easily create tables on data in spreadsheets, you can have it create a document in a design to look like specific types of documents you need. Re word emails to be more professional or change the perspective of the writing and such.
Not to mention using copilot to write more involved powershell scripts is very handy as well.
Yeah, at least for development work, no disagreement from me :)
Hadn't thought of trying that and I know I've got some redundant tasks where it could be helpful.
What's funny though is that office365 copilot often gets the names of Excel functions wrong, especially localized versions. You'd think they pay attention to that. No, they just push it out to the public without any serious QA beyond making it politically correct, cuz that's more important than getting even the basics right.
With AI users truly are the QA, which is fine, as long as they advertise it like that, but they don't.
This is true only for the false positives as they are easy to spot
False negatives are totally insidious. You'll never catch them unless you are specifically searching for them. It just needs extensive field testing.
For example someone who developed AI based tumor detection scanner said they needed 7 years of testing in the field before deployment
Well, at least it is another obvious lesson to teach the young and ingorant of how there is a ram cartel. Though since data storage is now reliant on ram too... perhaps hard drive will make a comeback. At a time when many new games require ssd's. Yay.