In a rather ironic turn of events, the rising cost of VRAM and other graphics card components, which has largely been driven by huge demand for Nvidia GPUs, might have come back to haunt the company. That’s because, according to a new report, the cost of servicing Nvidia GPU warranty claims has increased by more than 1,000% in the last year, costing the company nearly $1BN.
Ok, so calling $894M “nearly $1BN” could be seen as a bit of a stretch, considering the difference is still $106M, but proportionally, it is fairly close. Plus, more importantly, it’s a huge increase on the amount Nvidia paid out for claims against its best graphics cards the year before, which was just $81M.
These figures come from a report by Warranty Week, “the newsletter for warranty management professionals.” Having tracked warranty payouts for the GPU sector for several years, the company spotted the remarkable rise in its latest report covering up until the end of 2025, pointing out that it was “notable enough to prompt us to take a closer look at the industry this week.”
The most striking number is that $894M, and the fact that it’s over ten times higher than the previous year’s warranty claims cost. However, you might think that this is explained by the huge explosion in demand for Nvidia GPUs, and the increase in its revenue; if your sales increase tenfold, so might your warranty costs.
However, Warranty Week also calculated a warranty rate, which shows the cost of warranty claims in proportion to revenue, and by this metric, Nvidia’s warranty costs are shown to have increased far more than its revenue. In 2024, its rate was 0.1%, but in 2025 it rose eightfold to 0.9%, suggesting there could be an actual rise in the number of claims, as well as their cost.
Nvidia’s not alone in its warranty costs increasing, with AMD also seeing a significant change. However, its warranty claims only doubled, from $110M in 2024 to $238M in 2025. Moreover, AMD’s warranty claim rate rose by only 75%, from 0.4% to 0.7%. While these are much lower proportional changes, it’s worth noting that AMD has tended to have a much higher warranty rate than Nvidia, with it hovering around 0.5%. Meanwhile, Nvidia’s rate has often been below 0.1%, with two major increases: once in late 2022 and then last year.
What isn’t made entirely clear in this report is what impact the recent increase in VRAM prices has had on these warranty claim costs. The time period being considered for the overall warranty costs only just catches the start of those increases at the tail end of last year. However, the warranty rate chart, which is broken down by quarter, does correlate strongly with the time at which VRAM prices started to rise rapidly, although this wouldn’t seem to account for the entirety of the total cost change.
Also not clear is whether the much-reported incidents of melting RTX 5090 cards have had any impact on warranty rates. Given that the same issue affected the RTX 4090, and that there isn’t a strong correlation between the period of its launch and an uptick in warranty rates, it suggests this isn’t a major factor.
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