The price of both Nvidia and AMD GPUs could skyrocket in 2023, providing an extra incentive to order your new graphics card before the end of year. If the costs do rise, it won’t be a conspiracy by Nvidia and AMD to make amore profit, but rather an unfortunate circumstance of U.S. import tariffs expiring.
The U.S. Trade Representative recently announced that tariff exemptions were extended for several products, but hasn’t updated the exclusion for graphics cards. The exemption will expire on December 31, 2022, unless it’s renewed in the next few weeks. This means we could see prices could jump by as much as 25% in 2023.
That could hurt badly, especially since, after several years of rapidly increasing GPU prices and limited availability, graphics cards supplies have somewhat stabilized, along with prices. But as we’ve seen with cards like the RTX 4080, companies like Nvidia are starting to build the rising costs into the retail prices.
Imagine if the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 rose from its already expensive $1,600 cost to an eye-watering price of $2,000. That’s what a 25% increase looks like. An AMD Radeon RX 6950 XT that currently sells for $1,100 could shoot up near $1,400 in January of 2023, pulling almost $300 out of the tight budget you might be facing in the new year.
The strong tariffs on imports from China began in 2019, and many are still in effect today. The U.S. government has added several exclusions, including the graphics card exemption that Nvidia requested in December of last year. With supply issues causing additional costs to electronics manufacturers, the tariff was proving to be a heavy burden on an already struggling industry.
If you’ve been considering an upgrade of your GPU, it might be wise to make that purchase before the end of the year.
