But between the anti-competitive mess with the GeForce Partner Program, the way the company hid how much money it was making from the crypto bubble (which caused shareholders to sue), and now the incredible shortage of high-end GeForce GPUs due to the rise of AI, I just don’t feel right about giving money to Nvidia anymore.
And well, the company doesn’t need my money anyway. These days, Nvidia is gaining ground in selling high-end AI data center hardware, so the widespread complaints about the company “manufacturing” its own shortage of high-end graphics cards don’t really resonate with me.
Not because it’s not true (good luck finding an RTX 5090 for less than the price of a used car these days), but because Nvidia is a public company motivated to make money for itself and its shareholders, so of course will focus on serving the customers most willing to pay for its high-end hardware: artificial intelligence companies.
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I know I’ve already written about Nvidia’s waning interest in PC gaming, but I enjoyed a new perspective on the topic, courtesy of this week’s episode of The Full Nerd. The team ended up spending quite a bit of time discussing allegations that the company is stuffing high-end hardware packages into AI data centers before the centers are operational, which could leave piles of unused graphics cards collecting dust.
I encourage you to listen to the full episode to get your thoughts, but I for one am sure it’s more complicated than that because it seems highly unlikely that the hardware Nvidia sells for AI server racks can be easily repurposed and inserted into their next version of gaming PC. If there’s anything to worry about, it’s that Nvidia has probably been pouring more and more resources into its data center business for years, and less and less into producing PC gaming hardware.
That doesn’t seem likely to change anytime soon unless the AI boom blows up so badly that Nvidia’s data center business goes under, so I think there’s never been a better time to stop trying to buy Nvidia GPUs. I’m trying to get the parts to build a new mini-ITX gaming rig early next year, and despite my addiction to DLSS, I think the next graphics card I buy will be from AMD, before it becomes so dedicated to serving AI and data center companies that desktop GPUs become an afterthought.
