NVIDIA Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress's remarks at the fourth quarter financial report meeting of fiscal year 2026 completely extinguished players' hopes that the graphics card market will return to normal as soon as possible. She made it clear that the company expects the supply of consumer graphics cards to remain "very tight" in the first quarter of fiscal 2027 (i.e. February to April 2026) and beyond.
In a conference call with investors, Kreis admitted that while the company hopes to increase supply, "supply will be very tight in the next few quarters." Real improvement may not come until the end of 2026, but it's too early to talk about that now.
This statement explains why the retail prices of high-end models such as RTX 5080 and RTX 5070 Ti are already $200 to $500 higher than the official suggested retail price, and many models are sold out as soon as they are put on the shelves.
NVIDIA did not officially explain why it was unable to increase the supply of gaming graphics cards, but the answer is actually written in the financial report: In the last quarter, NVIDIA's total revenue was US$68.1 billion, of which the data center business contributed US$62.3 billion. For the entire fiscal year 2026, the gaming business revenue is only US$16 billion, while the data center business revenue is as high as US$193.7 billion - gaming is not even a fraction.
A simple calculation: the scale of AI business is 12 times that of games, and the profit margin is even more crushing. In the context of shortages of both production capacity and memory chips, production resources naturally flow to the most profitable places.
What makes players even more desperate is the news that Nvidia may set a record of not releasing any new game graphics cards in 2026 for the first time in 30 years. The next-generation RTX 60 series based on the Rubin architecture is said to be delayed until 2028. At the same time, the current RTX 50 series is also reducing production. The main shipments have become the RTX 5060 and 5060 Ti with 8GB of video memory, while the supply of RTX 5070 and above models has been delayed again and again.
To sum up 2026 in one sentence: Whether a graphics card can be bought and how much it costs no longer depends on what players want, but on how much production capacity the AI wants.