It’s clear for everyone to see that the GPU market is a bit of a mess right now. First and foremost, we’ve seen limited stock levels disrupting the prices of the latest RTX 50 series and RX 9000 series cards from Nvidia and AMD respectively. And now there’s another factor to think about: tariffs.

The US government rolled out a 10% tariff for electronic goods from China back in February, later raising this to 20%. This directly affects the graphics card market and has been a worrying prospect for PC gamers who have already had enough of rising GPU prices over the past few years, especially with the problem brought back to attention with a new generation of cards.

Nvidia doesn’t think tariffs will be meaningful as it pushes for more US production

Speaking in an interview with CNBC, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang downplayed the danger of rising tariffs for Chinese imports. When asked if the possibility of yet another tariff rise to 25% will slow down, limit, or put a cap on the company’s growth, he was quick to highlight their plans for US-based production.

“We’re [as] enthusiastic about building in America as anybody. We’ve been working with TSMC to get them ready for manufacturing chips here in the United States. We also have great partners like Foxconn and Wistron who are working with us to bring manufacturing onshore. Long term manufacturing onshore is going to be some very, very to do – and we’ll do at incredible scale.”

Jensen Huang, Nvidia CEO

Huang goes on to answer a follow-up question regarding the large amount of business Nvidia does in China. He explains that in the near term the impact of tariffs “will not be meaningful” going on to say that “there are companies from all over the world” implementing AI into its products, noting that “AI has gone mainstream,” so there’s not too much to worry about right now.

Of course, a lot of Nvidia’s GPU business these days is in the data center and server market. The company provides much of the hardware that is training the latest AI models, such as Grok. Team Green also recently teamed up with DeepSeek, with Huang praising the start-up for its “world-class” open-source reasoning model.

As for consumer graphics cards for PC enthusiasts and gamers, it’s difficult to say how much these shifts in production and tariffs will change for the end user. What we can point out is that GPUs already fail to retail (or very little of them retail) at their advertised MSRPs. We need to wait for the GPU market to settle and stock levels to recover before people no longer have to pay scalper prices. Rival AMD has already explained how it can deal with RX 9070 series price hikes, but the impact of tariffs, even after it has (hopefully) cleared up, remains to be seen.

About the Author

Jack Goodall

At PC Guide, Jack is mostly responsible for reporting on hardware deals. He also specializes in monitors, TVs, and headsets and can be found putting his findings together in a review or best-of guide.