While some AMD and Nvidia cards have been good, GPU sales haven't been pretty pants for both of them as consumers feel that the companies are not making good consumer cards any longer.

This is odd as many gamers had not been buying cards because of crypto-miners buying up all the GPUs to support their global Ponzi scheme.  That bubble has not burst but is not viable and now more GPUs are available.

The AI boom made Nvida into a trillion-dollar company. AMD, which had not got its AI act together, lagged cke behind but will soon be catching up.

This leaves both in the position that they will make less money chasing consumer GPU sales than fitting out expensive AI setups.  

Both companies will face shareholder pressure to move towards AI to feed data centre demand from Google, Microsoft, and Amazon.  If both companies have AI products, it will create a bubble similar to the Crypto mining operations with resources only allocated there, leaving the consumer GPU as the second fiddle.

Last week, Nvidia put its Lovelace GPUs on ice, which shouldn't surprise anyone considering that there are too many Nvidia graphics cards out there, with many cards even getting some great graphics card deals from retailers. But this could also be a sign of things to come. There have been mutterings that Nvidia will leave the consumer graphics card market entirely in the next decade.

Then there were rumours that Nvidia was producing more Hopper chips instead, and these are the chips that power datacentres and generative AI networks and models that power ChatGPT, and Midjourney.

As far as Nvidia is concerned, why produce a gaming graphics card with a profit margin of 10- 20 per cent and an elaborate channel when a Hopper chip could possibly net a profit of 40- 50 per cent and can be sold in bulk to data centre customers?

Because it got there first, Nvidia could walk away completely from its consumer cards, and few would bat an eyelid.

AMD, in arriving late, can decide what it wants to move into the areas where Nvidia is leaving or join it in limiting its consumer GPUS in favour of AI offerings.  AMD’s situation could be dictated by how many consumer gaming cards it thinks it can sell. Personally, I would think it would reduce the number of cards dramatically and focus on AI.

It is also possible that AMD’s consumer GPU rivalry could be against a newly restored Intel as Nvida leaves.