As we’ve already said a number of times on this site, the Americans are sanctioning China. Nevertheless, US sanctions are making a mess of the graphics card market. Clearly, some partners will be forced to relocate their production outside China!
US sanctions: offshoring and price hikes?
Right now, if you’re looking for the highest-performance graphics card, you need an RTX 4090. However, while the chip is produced in Taiwan, the card is mostly assembled in China… But with American sanctions, assembly in China is no longer authorized. As a result, it would not be difficult to divert entire shipments of cards, and the effects of the sanctions would fall by the wayside.
A number of NVIDIA’s partners have assembly lines based in China. This is the case of ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI, PNY, etc., at least according to Tom’s Hardware. As you can see, in order to continue producing RTX 4090s, brands have to relocate their production, which takes time. In the meantime, the market has to make do with the stocks already in place, which were partially nibbled away by NVIDIA shortly before the restrictions took effect.
The rest you know: high demand, low supply = rising prices. That’s what we’re seeing in the USA, where the RTX 4090 is selling for at least $1900, compared with $1600 or even below MSRP when things were going well.
However, there may be other reasons for these rising prices. Tom’s Hardware mentions the possible arrival of an RTX 4090 Ti, which could disrupt production of the current card. Alternatively, Black Friday is mentioned as a potential source of “false bargains”. We’re all familiar with the practice: before promotional periods, prices suddenly rise to offer tempting percentage discounts.
What about the future?
As you can see, if the first hypothesis proves true, we fear the worst for the future. Over time, card performance increases mechanically. It’s not impossible that, in the future, more and more cards will exceed the 4800 TOPS threshold for US sanctions. But what will happen? Prices are likely to rise, since production will leave China in order to be able to produce. This will disrupt the supply chain. However, relocating a factory takes time and costs money. And we mustn’t forget that production costs vary from country to country, and this can have repercussions on the bill!