(Yicai) July 31 -- Prices of consumer-grade graphics processing units in China have risen sharply again as the rapid expansion of the artificial intelligence industry continues to squeeze supplies of key upstream computing components, Yicai learned during a recent visit to Huaqiangbei, the country's largest electronics trading hub.

The price of US chipmaker Nvidia’s RTX 5060 Ti 16GB GPU, for example, has climbed to between CNY4,800 (USD710) and CNY4,900, up more than CNY1,000 from its previous price of just over CNY3,000. The higher-end RTX 5070 Ti 16GB GPU has now surged to between CNY5,000 and CNY6,000 while prices for premium products have risen even more sharply, with the RTX 5090 series soaring around 70 percent to about CNY34,000.

In recent years, production capacity for key components such as graphics memory and memory chips has been shifting to AI servers and data centers, leaving significantly fewer supplies for the consumer market, a salesperson at a graphics card wholesaler said.

“Many chips are supplied to the AI market first, leaving fewer supplies available for consumer products,” the salesperson added.

Rising upstream costs are another major driver of this latest round of price increases, the head of another graphics card wholesaler told Yicai. As the cost of key components such as graphics memory continues to rise, Santa Clara-based Nvidia and its partners have raised the prices of their products, resulting in higher procurement costs for manufacturers, which has in turn been passed onto the retail market.

Against the backdrop of continued strong investment in AI infrastructure, the consumer-grade GPU market is undergoing a redistribution of supply and demand. For students and gamers planning to assemble computers during the summer holiday, the price of a mid-to-high-end graphics card is now close to or even higher than that of an entire mainstream computer.

Editor: Kim Taylor