The many new enemies of the chip giant

For more than 20 years, the graphics card manufacturer EVGA had only purchased chips from the manufacturer Nvidia. The graphic bolides from California were regarded as technically leading. But on Friday, the US market leader ended the decade-long relationship with a bang: Effective immediately, Nvidia will no longer purchase new graphics chips and, in particular, will no longer develop the new generation of graphics cards with the upcoming RTX 4000 chips, the EVGA management said in a post in his customer forum. EVGA thus foregoes 80 percent of its annual sales. The company would rather shrink like this than continue to bother with Nvidia.

What at first glance sounds like niche news relevant only to PC games enthusiasts is in reality a clear alarm signal for the chip giant and its investors. Nvidia has annoyed many business partners and customers within a short time. Because in the past 24 months, graphics cards were usually only available at exorbitant prices, the global shortage of chips was only one reason for this: According to analysts, Nvidia sold a good part of its chips to crypto mining entrepreneurs via Asian manufacturers.

They used the powerful graphics chips to mine the cryptocurrency Ethereum. The tickets were correspondingly scarce in regular sales. At times, the cards were traded at more than twice the Nvidia recommended price. Mostly young computer gamers could not afford the exorbitant prices that the mining companies were willing to pay for their hardware. EVGA was the only card manufacturer to take player needs into account and sell at list price via a waiting list.

But the record prices ended last week at the latest: Ethereum was switched to a so-called "Proof of Stake" procedure in a consensus decision of all participants in the mining network, the computing power of the mining companies is no longer required. But this means that a main sales market is gone, Nvidia suddenly and drastically lowered its price recommendations for the current generation of graphics cards and started a de facto sell-off of the chips. At the beginning of August, the group had to correct its forecast for the past quarter by a whopping $2 billion to $6.7 billion because sales of gaming graphics cards had already collapsed.

EVGA openly expresses how frustrated the card manufacturers are with Nvidia's business practices: First, no chips were available for months, now the manufacturers' warehouses are suddenly full of cards that will be obsolete in just a few weeks. EVGA states that it is currently making a loss with every graphics card it sells. Nvidia dictated prices and quantities for months, causing difficulties for its hardware partners.

Now you want to let the business with the graphics hardware rather be. According to analyzes from Taiwan, other manufacturers are also currently reducing their chip orders. The change to the upcoming RTX 4000 chip generation could be bumpy. Investors also fear this: Since the turn of the year, the price of Nvidia shares has more than halved.