MSI confirms GeForce RTX 50 Series shortage and more price increases incoming

In a new report in Taiwan's United Daily News publication (auto-translated), MSI's General Manager Huang Jinqing has warned investors in a recent briefing that 2026 is shaping up to be the "most severe year since the company was founded." Naturally, this is due to current DRAM, storage, and even GPU supply and pricing issues driven by demand for all things AI and AI infrastructure.

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And when it comes to graphics cards, of which MSI is a key GeForce RTX partner, the company estimates a supply gap of around 20%, meaning NVIDIA isn't able to provide the stock and GPUs needed to maintain the broader consumer PC market. Not only that, but MSI also predicts this will lead to the PC market shrinking by 10 to 20% in 2026, a larger figure than the one we recently reported from the International Data Corporation (IDC).

When it comes to the company's plans to weather the storm, so to speak, in 2026, it will focus on the mid-range and high-end GeForce RTX market, with cards like the GeForce RTX 5060 and RTX 5070, and the price of its graphics cards will increase by anywhere between 15 and 30%. The goal is to increase profit and profit margins as the overall volume decreases.

Cutting back on lower-end models with low profit margins might become the new norm for many companies in the short term as component costs continue to rise. However, the report also indicates that MSI will switch its motherboard memory focus from DDR5 to DDR4 this year, as DDR4 memory prices are much more reasonable than the skyrocketing DDR5 prices.

And finally, outside the consumer space, MSI is actively working to rapidly expand its AI and data center/server business, with a growth target of 50 to 100% per year for the next three to five years, targeting second and third-tier customers to build its presence in this space.