Do you remember the crypto-mining storm that ravaged the graphics card market a few years ago? That painful period when gamers couldn't find cards and prices tripled on the black market might soon look like a light breeze compared to the massive crisis looming today. Today, we face an opponent far more powerful, wealthier, and hungrier than crypto miners: Artificial Intelligence (AI). Graphics cards are no longer just hardware for gaming; they are the new "gold" of the digital world, and those who hold this gold are chasing goals much larger than gaming.
New Priority in Silicon Valley: Data Centers, Not Gamers
For tech giants like NVIDIA and AMD, the picture is now crystal clear. The "gaming" unit, which was the flagship of these companies for many years, has long since been replaced by the "data center and AI" unit. The numbers prove how ruthless this shift is. Looking at NVIDIA's recent financial reports, we see that AI-focused data center revenues have reached the $115 billion level. In contrast, the gaming unit, which includes the GeForce series, remained at around $11 billion—nearly one-tenth of the AI unit.
This situation also determines where companies allocate their engineering power and production capacity. On one hand, you have an RTX 5090 selling for $1,500 - $2,000; on the other, there are H100 or B200 AI accelerators coming off the same production line, fetching between $30,000 and $40,000 each. It isn't hard to guess which side companies will prioritize with their limited production capacity.
The Profit/GB Equation and the VRAM Drought
This "occupation" of the graphics card market has a technical name: Profit/GB efficiency. For GPU manufacturers, Video RAM (VRAM) is currently one of the most valuable resources in the world. Large Language Models (LLMs) require massive memory capacities to process enormous datasets. Manufacturers like NVIDIA prioritize professional AI cards over low-profit gaming cards when allocating their memory stocks.
In fact, this has reached such an extreme point that some claims suggest NVIDIA is no longer shipping GPU chips bundled with memory to its partners; instead, it expects manufacturers to source VRAM on their own. This explains why stocks of high-memory graphics cards (like the RTX 4090 or the anticipated RTX 5090) are so low and their prices so astronomical.
Postponed Dreams: RTX 50 Super and the Rubin Architecture
The delays in the next-generation cards that gamers have been eagerly awaiting are no coincidence. As highlighted in reports from Webtekno, rumors suggest the NVIDIA RTX 50 SUPER series has slipped into 2027, and even the next major architecture, Rubin (expected to be the foundation for the RTX 60 series), has been pushed far back from its original schedule.
A similar strategy prevails on the AMD side. RDNA 5-based graphics cards are not expected to arrive before the second half of 2027. Manufacturers are currently dedicating all their energy to meeting the insatiable AI hardware demand from giants like OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, and Meta. With TSMC’s production lines filled with orders from these titans, the "next-gen" experience for gamers looks set to remain on the waiting list for a while longer.
The Bitter Pill for Gamers
Added to the global crisis, local economic conditions make the situation even more tragic in regions like Turkey. Today, an RTX 5090 selling in the 170,000 TL range is no longer just a "graphics card" but has turned into a luxury investment vehicle. Diminishing stocks and the shift of production priority toward AI are driving up the prices of even entry-level and mid-range cards.
The era of "building a system at a reasonable price" is being replaced by the question, "How long can I keep my current hardware alive?" In today’s market, buying a graphics card isn't just purchasing a component; it means entering a silicon war against global AI giants.
The unstoppable rise of AI has permanently changed the world of graphics cards. We are moving rapidly toward a future where cloud-based gaming services (like GeForce NOW) replace local hardware ownership. Owning a high-performance GPU in our personal computers may soon become a privilege reserved for a very small and very wealthy minority. For gamers, the "golden age" of the graphics card market has long since closed; now begins the era of survival in the shadow of AI and squeezing every last drop of performance out of existing technology.
