NVIDIA faces rising GPU prices amid transition to Rubin AI architecture

NVIDIA is facing significant shifts in its product market as it transitions toward its next-generation AI chip architecture, Rubin. In the consumer segment, rising component costs for DRAM and NAND flash memory have driven substantial price increases for NVIDIA's Blackwell mid-range graphics cards. Retail prices for the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB have surged by over 39%, while the RTX 5070 has seen an average retail increase of 29%.

On the institutional side, Bank of America has designated NVIDIA a ‘top pick’ with a target price of $350, citing the potential for a multi-quarter upgrade cycle driven by the Rubin platform and Vera CPU. Analysts suggest that while rising memory costs pose a risk to margins, NVIDIA’s strong pricing power and the high demand for AI computing power allow the company to potentially pass these costs on to customers. The Rubin platform is expected to target a significant reduction in inference token costs and is anticipated to be deployed by major cloud service providers including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Oracle.