Nvidia doesn't care about gamers
Computex has made it all too clear how little interest Nvidia has in GeForce. This is due to economic pressure, summarizes Mark Mantel.
At his Computex keynote, Nvidia boss Jensen Huang sometimes looked like a dealer for AI chips.
(Image: Nvidia)
Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang no longer sees his company as a graphics card manufacturer, but as an "AI company". His keynote speech at the Computex IT trade fair a few days ago made this all too clear.
Huang didn't just say that Nvidia has evolved into an AI company – no, the management can't help but massively prioritize AI accelerators, leaving gamers out in the cold. Exciting new graphics cards for gamers are receding into the distance.
A question of investors
A (still current) Hopper accelerator H100 costs well over 20,000 euros and drives Nvidia's net margin close to 80 percent. Prices of at least 60,000 euros are expected for the successor B100. On the other hand, GeForce graphics cards, the fastest versions of which Nvidia can barely sell for 2,000 euros. And the production capacity of supplier TSMC is limited.
True to Jensen Huang's cranky logic of "the more you buy, the more you save," the reverse conclusion should be "the more we sell, the more we lose". Every piece of silicon that Nvidia sells as a GeForce GPU and not as an AI accelerator for data centers makes less profit.
And investors don't like that at all.
Nvidia's data center division is growing by billions every quarter. It recently accounted for 87 percent of the company's turnover. Demand from Microsoft, Google & Co. is so high that Nvidia and its chip contract manufacturer TSMC cannot keep up with production.
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GeForce vs. AI accelerator
It bites players that Nvidia doesn't at least switch to a 3-nanometer process for the next high-margin AI accelerator, Blackwell B100. The GeForce and accelerator divisions are fighting for the same production capacities within TSMC's N4 generation until further notice.
Even worse: According to earlier rumors, the GeForce RTX 5090 will consist of two composite GB203 chips on a silicon interposer. As a result, Nvidia would need 3D packaging capacity for a GeForce graphics card for the first time, but TSMC does not have much of it available.
Nvidia simply could not milk gamers hard enough to make significant production capacity for a GeForce RTX 5090 with multi-chip GPU worthwhile.
Nvidia is said to have already found a way out of the dilemma with notebook processors: Intel as a chip contract manufacturer (Intel Foundry).
We wouldn't be surprised if the conflicting GPU rumors all have a core of truth: First it was said that the GeForce RTX 5090 could become a 600-watt GPU with a massive cooler. Then there was talk of a much more compact dual-slot graphics card. Perhaps Nvidia is postponing the multi-GPU approach for a Ti version or Titan at this time.
It's also sad to admit that Nvidia doesn't really need to try with graphics cards. AMD poses no threat; no more high-end models are to be released within the Radeon RX 8000 series. Nvidia already has an 88 percent market share in desktop graphics cards. Radeons are a marginal phenomenon when it comes to stand-alone notebook graphics chips. And Intel's Arc has not yet played a significant role either.
Daddy Jensen is celebrated for AI
Computex is – usually – primarily about hardware for private individuals. AMD presumably spent a lot of money to give the prestigious opening keynote. Nvidia didn't care much and pushed ahead with an unofficial Computex presentation the night before.
For almost two hours, CEO Huang was celebrated like a local rock star in a sports arena. However, there were virtually no substantial announcements. The most interesting was an updated data center roadmap with Ruby accelerators and Vera processors. This was worth three "Best Choice Awards" to the Computex organizers.
For gamers, there wasn't even a hint of a teaser. Young people would call this "blue balling".
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(mma)
