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[Chazore]

JEMC said:

The problem is the rest of the world.

Sure, they can set a lower price now just so when tariffs kick in the retail price doesn't skyrocket, but then that leaves them having to deal with your other (admitedly, smaller) markets. Would they price them the same as the original US price or for the guessed after-tariffs price? After all, we don't even know how big the tariffs will actually be. They could be the rumored 60%, but they could also be 40%, you never know. And that's quite a margin to deal with.

Also, there are companies that have taken action to try to prevent this. The company that makes the Zotac and Inno3D cards moved their assembly factory out of China, so they could ship GPUs to the US without being affected by tariffs to Chinese goods. What willhappen with them? Will they be able to keep selling the GPUs at the original price since they're tariff free or will Nvidia raise they cost of the chips so the ards end up costing the same? After all, you'll have to be very, very loyal to Asus or another brand to pay hundreds of dollars more for the same product.

We can't forget about profit margins either. Both AMD and Nvidia have to meet certain profitability goals, and you can bet the shareholders won't be happy with them earning an hypothetical 20% margin over their chips instead of the usual 33, 40 or 50% one. And that goes especially for Nvidia where shareholders don't care about game GPU when they could sell those for more AI chips for much more money.

And stores are the same. They won't cut their profit margins to sell more cards, and may actually raise them even more to keep the same % margins (LTT made a video touching it some weeks ago).

So yeah, it's a messed up situation where any guess is possible because we know so little. We don't know the price Nvidia, AMD and Intel want for their next cards, when the tariffs will take effect, how bif the tariffs will actually be, what will happen to the other markets, etc.

The only thing we know, as you said, is that we, consumers, will end paying more for them.

Even if it's a 40-60% increase, that's still going to end up being offloaded to the retailer and then to the customer at the end of our days. We still have to deal with the brunt of the bill and we know Nvidia doesn't care, nor will they ever take the hit for retailer/customer sake (we've seen them string up 3rd parties before and drove one of them to just bow out of the industry entirely).

AMD on the other hand doesn't have much of a choice, with their margins being low enough as is, and their market share dwindling, so they have to take the hit somewhere, or just follow Nvidia's route and drown themselves out of the market. The thing is, nvidia is so rich at this point that they could take the hit, but we all know AMD can't just keep following Nvidia like this, because we know they can't afford to take too many hits with how low their market share is.

While the US market will be a primary effected target, the UK and Australia/GER will also see their own forms of price increases, or at the worst, scalping/AI tech bros buying them up, but again, we're all going to suffer in some form or another, but I can see the US suffering more due to the tariffs. 

My guess is that Nvidia flat out does not care. They know they can bank on AI/Data centers now more than ever, so them losing some customers, or watching retailers choke to death doesn't seem high on their concerns list. I imagine they're even happy to watch things burn around them, since it's not directly impacting them to change course (they likely know that someone else will crop up and replace another retailer for them to make deals with, or at best, Nvidia become the sole sellers giving them complete control, which I'm sure they'd want).

I truly wish to god we could do something about this, but I'm just left rolling my eyes at all the guppies and parrots murmuring "don't buy the cards duuuh", because they fail to see the bigger picture. They don't seem to realise that us not buying the cards out right isn't going to happen, because reality doesn't always pan out that way, and for another, AI/ Data centers atm outrank us, so that's even more leverage stripped from consumer bargaining power. We are currently damned if we do, damned if we don't, and yeah, we did land ourselves into this situation 2 decades ago (We just didn't pay attention, while Nvidia was the whole time).

Last edited by Chazore - on 28 December 2024