PC Partner Group has warned that supply shortages for entry level graphics cards could worsen during the second half of 2026.
The hardware manufacturer announced in its financial results for the first half of 2026 that growing memory costs are expected to push average selling prices higher across the graphics card market through the end of the year.
PC Partner Group is a major computer hardware company headquartered in Hong Kong that owns the Zotac, Inno3D and Manli brands. Graphics cards, or graphics processing units, are hardware components in personal computers responsible for rendering visual displays, processing 3D graphics and driving video games.
Rising memory costs and data center demand
The company stated that surging demand for artificial intelligence infrastructure is the underlying cause of the supply chain disruption. Rapid expansion in data center investments has placed heavy pressure on global memory manufacturing capacity.
That manufacturing bottleneck is affecting the supply of GDDR6 and GDDR7 memory modules used in consumer graphics hardware. GDDR6 and GDDR7 are specialized types of high speed video random access memory designed to deliver high bandwidth data transfer between graphics processors and system memory.
Data center accelerators, which are specialized high performance computing processors used to train and run artificial intelligence models, draw from the same global semiconductor manufacturing resources. Artificial intelligence demand is expected to shape the broader memory market throughout 2026.
PC Partner Group noted that consumer graphics cards and data center accelerators do not use the exact same memory configurations, meaning they do not compete directly for identical memory chips. However, the combined pressure on semiconductor fabrication capacity and supply chain resources still increases overall manufacturing costs for consumer GPUs.
Impact on budget graphics cards
PC Partner Group did not specify which individual graphics card models will be directly affected by the ongoing supply constraints. However, market pricing indicates that budget cards are already experiencing the impact of rising costs.
Entry level models such as the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5050, Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060, AMD Radeon RX 9050 and AMD Radeon RX 9060 are already listed above their recommended retail prices in several regional markets. Recommended retail prices are the baseline figures set by chip designers Nvidia and AMD before distributor markups.
The manufacturer noted that these supply challenges are particularly significant for consumers building affordable gaming desktop computers. Entry level cards have long provided a lower cost gateway for PC builders who do not require premium computing power. PC Partner Group indicated that if memory supply shortages persist, the price advantage of budget graphics cards will decrease further in the second half of the year.
