TECH NEWS – In a single year, the Jensen Huang-led company saw the cost of this explode by 1003%, pushing the total to nearly a billion dollars…

If you are looking for an unlikely window into the world of GPU manufacturing, a professional newsletter aimed at warranty managers is probably near the bottom of the list. Yet in 2025, Nvidia paid almost $900 million in warranty claims. That is roughly ten times the amount from the previous year. The first chart shows the total cost of claims paid out by AMD and Nvidia based on figures drawn from financial filings. Last year, that amounted to around $894 million for Nvidia and roughly $238 million for AMD.

The figures cover every product counted as a discrete GPU, meaning graphics cards for gaming and workstations, AI accelerators, and laptop graphics chips. Nvidia sells far more GPUs than AMD or Intel, and that naturally shows up in the difference between their claim totals. Still, a quick glance at the 2024 figures is enough to see that something huge changed in the space of one year. Back then, AMD and Nvidia were paying fairly similar totals, $110 million and $81 million respectively. So why are the 2025 figures so much bigger? In Nvidia’s case, they are 1003% bigger.

For most of 2025, Nvidia’s warranty payouts did not look abnormal. The first quarter came in at $147 million, followed by $80 million in the second quarter and $156 million in the third. Then the final three months of 2025 sent everything off the rails: warranty claim costs hit $511 million in that quarter alone. It is tempting to point at Meltygate, the incidents involving melting 12VHPWR connectors on RTX graphics cards, as the main explanation, but that likely would not account for the whole difference. Discrete GPU-based products often carry multi-year warranties, so some of these claims relate to cards bought well before 2025. What is genuinely striking is the fact that graphics cards and other GPU products became far more expensive during this period, and that trend continued into 2026 as well.

The second chart shows that Nvidia’s complaint rate rose sharply in the second half of 2025. It started at roughly 0.2% in the first and second quarters, climbed to a bit above 0.3% in the third quarter, and then jumped to 0.9% in the final quarter. Compared with 2024, Nvidia’s final complaint rate last year was 800% higher. Why that figure became so much larger remains a bit of a mystery. One thing is certain, though: both GPU makers launched far more products in 2025 than they did in 2024. AMD, for example, launched only nine new GPUs two years ago, and only one of those was a gaming graphics card, whereas last year it shipped 23 different models across every discrete GPU segment.

The difference was not quite as dramatic for Nvidia, but it still launched more products in 2025 than in 2024, and it flooded the gaming graphics card market with a huge wave of RTX 5000-series products. Given the sheer number of variants from different board partners and the enormous volume of AI accelerators sold last year, perhaps it is not that surprising that warranty claims spiked this hard…

Source: PCGamer, Warranty Week