According to the latest statistics from industry analyst Warranty Week, GPU giant NVIDIA's spending on product warranty will surge by approximately 1,000% in 2025 compared with 2024, climbing to US$894 million from US$81 million in the previous year. The surge in warranty costs is not only related to the rising prices of graphics card hardware in recent years, but also closely related to the significant increase in warranty claim rates.
Since the launch of the RTX 40 series, the reliability of the new generation 12VHPWR power supply interface under high-power loads has attracted much attention, and the RTX 50 series continues to further increase power consumption and is generally believed to have increased the early failure rate.
Data from Warranty Week pointed out that NVIDIA's warranty claim rate in 2025 rose to a maximum of 0.9% in the fourth quarter of that year, while the figure in the first quarter of 2025 was only 0.17%, showing a clear upward trend in the claim rate throughout the year. Meanwhile, rival AMD's warranty performance has also deteriorated, with its overall warranty claim rate rising from 0.43% in 2024 to 0.68% in 2025. In absolute terms, AMD's warranty spend in 2025 will be $238 million, an increase of more than 100% from $110 million in 2024.
In terms of warranty reserves, the two companies have also significantly increased their reserves to deal with potential risks in the future. As of the end of 2025, NVIDIA's warranty reserve balance expanded to $2.59 billion from $416 million in 2024, a significant increase. During the same period, AMD's warranty reserves increased from US$310 million to US$597 million, reflecting that its expectations for future warranty cost pressure are also rising.
It is generally believed in the industry that as the power consumption of high-end GPUs continues to rise and the cost of key components such as core and video memory increases, once a product fails, the amount of a single warranty payment will be significantly higher than that of previous generations of products, which is also one of the important factors driving up the overall warranty expenditure. However, judging from the absolute value of the claim rate, most of the products of the two manufacturers are still within the normal operating range. However, compared with previous years, hardware reliability and warranty risks have become cost variables that cannot be ignored in the high-performance graphics card business.