According to the latest report from DigiTimes, PC motherboard sales are facing the most serious market adjustment in recent years, and manufacturers are generally experiencing weak demand. This crisis stems from the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence data centers, which has led to a serious shortage of chip resources in the entire industry, thus causing a chain impact on the consumer PC DIY market. A severe shortage of silicon wafer supply has driven a surge in demand for DRAM and CPUs. The prices of DDR4 and DDR5 memory sets have risen sharply, and the price of ordinary CPUs has also risen sharply.
Affected by this, PC motherboard manufacturers are caught in the cracks of supply chain shortages, and motherboard shipment forecasts have been significantly reduced. The report pointed out that all Taiwanese motherboard manufacturers have significantly lowered their shipment targets for 2026, with some manufacturers' expected sales falling by more than 25%. ASUS expects to sell about 10 million motherboards in 2026, while MSI and Gigabyte's sales forecasts are both less than 10 million, a year-on-year decrease of about 25% compared to 2025. ASRock is in the most severe situation, and according to the report, the decline is expected to reach 30%.
It is worth noting that in addition to CPU and memory shortages, consumers have slowed down the upgrade cycle of NVIDIA graphics cards, which has also had an impact on motherboard sales. Especially in the "Blackwell" GPU generation, consumers began to purchase PCIe 5.0 motherboards to get the best performance improvements. However, as the global DRAM shortage has made these GPUs more scarce and expensive, consumers are significantly less willing to upgrade.
To make things more complicated, the cost structure of assembling PCs has undergone fundamental changes. After the increase in memory prices, DRAM sets currently account for more than 30% of PC costs. In the DIY PC field, the shortage of AMD and Intel CPUs has also affected PC assemblers' opportunities to purchase new motherboards, and there is still uncertainty about when the entire supply chain will be relieved. In the current market environment, with consumers wary of large-scale upgrades, the gaming PC market is expected to take a significant hit in the coming months. Even AMD CEO Dr. Su Zifeng pointed out that game demand will decline in the second half of this year, which adds more negative expectations to the severe current situation of the PC DIY market.