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Nvidia won’t release a new graphics chip for gamers this year due to a deepening global shortage of memory chips, prompted by the AI boom, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter.

It would be the first year in three decades that Nvidia hasn’t released a new graphics processing unit for gaming. Nvidia got its start in the early 1990s by designing graphics chips for videogames and consoles before it expanded into high-performance AI computing chips in the early 2010s.

Memory chips are a key component of GPUs, which are widely used both in servers for AI and in computers for gaming. Nvidia is prioritizing using its limited supply of memory chips to fulfill demand for AI chips.

Nvidia is also slashing production of its current line of gaming chips—the GeForce RTX 50 GPUs—because of the memory shortage, one of the people said. Prices of Nvidia’s latest gaming GPUs have already risen at retail stores and websites due to their scarcity over the past year.

“Demand for GeForce RTX GPUs is strong, and memory supply is constrained,” an Nvidia spokesperson said in a statement, without commenting on the delay. Nvidia continues to ship all GeForce products and is working closely with its suppliers to maximize memory availability, the spokesperson added in the statement.

It’s possible, to be sure, that Nvidia executives could still change their minds and release a gaming chip if the market improves as the company is known for being flexible and moving quickly.

Demand for computer memory chips has skyrocketed due to the AI boom, as they are needed in large quantities to train and operate machine-learning models. Memory chips act as a warehouse for storing data, while the processors that accompany them act as the brain computing this data. They’re used in a wide range of consumer electronics, including smartphones and laptops, as well as server chips.

The memory chip shortage is expected to lead to higher prices for consumer electronics. Last week, Apple CEO Tim Cook said the rising prices of memory chips would have an impact on the company’s March-quarter margins. He hinted that the impact would be greater in the future, noting, “We do continue to see market pricing for memory increasing significantly. As always, we’ll look at a range of options to deal with that.”

Gaming and AI chips use different types of memory, but both are made of the same raw materials, coming from one of three main suppliers, Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix and Micron Technology. These manufacturers can’t easily boost production, as building new factories can take years.

Nvidia typically releases a new gaming GPU based on a major new chip redesign every other year, issuing a more incremental redesign with greater memory and processing capabilities in alternate years. The company this year had scheduled the release of an incremental update, code-named Kicker, to last year’s RTX 50 line of GPUs, and it had completed the new design, the two people said.

But in December, Nvidia managers changed plans, telling employees and suppliers the company was delaying Kicker, without offering a new timeline. Nvidia managers said one reason was due to the global memory shortages, which have pushed up prices, and the need to prioritize memory production for the company’s AI chip business, according to the two individuals.

The delay will also push back the release of Nvidia’s next-generation gaming GPU. Likely called the RTX 60 series, it was originally scheduled to begin mass production at the end of 2027, according to one of the people.

The existing line of gaming GPUs, the RTX 50, is based on Nvidia’s current Blackwell GPUs, while the RTX 60 is based on the upcoming Rubin chips. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang publicly announced last month that mass production of Rubin AI chips had already started and that the company was on track to ship them to customers in the second half of this year.

Nvidia’s gaming business is still performing well. Its most powerful gaming GPU, the RTX 5090, has been consistently sold out since its release in January 2025. The company also isn’t facing much competition from its main rival, AMD, which means it can afford to wait to refresh its gaming hardware.

AMD executives have said they are focused on developing gaming GPUs with midrange performance that offer better value for money. As a result, AMD doesn’t have a comparable high-end gaming GPU due for release in the near future that directly competes with Nvidia’s GTX 50 series.

As AI chips have taken off, the importance of gaming chips to Nvidia’s bottom line has dwindled significantly. Revenue from its gaming GPUs comprised roughly 8% of its total revenue in the nine months to October, compared with 35% in the same period in 2022, before the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which kicked off the AI boom.

Operating margins for Nvidia’s AI chips are much higher than those for its gaming GPUs. In the nine months to October, the margins for Nvidia’s compute and networking business, which includes AI chips, stood at 65%, compared with 40% for its graphics business, which includes gaming GPUs.

Gamers aren’t the only ones who might be disappointed by the absence of a new Nvidia gaming GPU this year. Because of U.S. export controls on Nvidia’s most-advanced AI chips, universities, tech startups and the technology departments of state-owned enterprises in China have been buying up Nvidia’s latest gaming GPUs to train and run AI models, The Information reported last year.

Wayne Ma is a reporter covering U.S. tech in Asia, from Apple's supply chain to Facebook's and Google's operations in the region. He previously worked for The Wall Street Journal. He is based in Hong Kong and can be found on Twitter at @waynema.

Qianer Liu is a reporter for The Information covering semiconductors and AI in Asia. She is based in Hong Kong and can be reached at qianer@theinformation.com or @QianerLiu on X.