AMD’s price hike lands 2 days after its 4GB card, and the timing isn’t an accident

AMD waited. That’s the part worth sitting with.

According to hardware leaker Harukaze 5719 on Twitter, AMD has reportedly told its AIB partners that GPU prices go up by at least 10% starting next month. The reason is the memory crisis driven by AI demand, the same squeeze that’s been chewing through hardware pricing all year.

And it arrives just a couple of days after AMD introduced a new 4GB graphics card.

The waiting game Team Red was playing

The post Harukaze linked suggests AMD has been sitting on these increases for a while. Team Red was supposedly holding off until current inventory thinned out. But it also appears to have been waiting on something else: Nvidia announcing its own price increases first.

Nvidia did that earlier this week. Now AMD moves.

The line from the post that should worry anyone shopping for a card is this one: “the price positioning is expected to be similar to that of NV (Nvidia) graphics cards.” That’s not a company reluctantly absorbing costs. That’s a company that spotted an opening in the market and decided to close it.

What this does to the one card that was still a deal

The Radeon RX 9070 XT runs about $700 to $750 on Newegg right now. It launched at $599 in March 2025, so the damage is already done before this increase even hits.

Here’s why that stings. Since it came out, the 9070 XT has been the better buy against the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti. Same rough performance, considerably less money. That gap was the whole argument for the card.

After next month, that value window could narrow. Maybe close.

These are supplier prices, but don’t get comfortable

Like the Nvidia increases from earlier this week, these are supplier-side numbers. In theory that means the full 10% doesn’t automatically land on your credit card.

In practice, it almost certainly will. Third-party graphics card manufacturers don’t operate on the kind of margins that let them eat a 10% cost bump out of goodwill.

AMD has been contacted for comment on the increases, and this story will be updated if the company responds.

The rest of the year doesn’t look friendlier

Valve said this month that prices are only going to get worse. Sony will probably dodge a PS5 price increase for the remainder of the year, but that changes once the company runs out of RAM after this fiscal year.

So: a new 4GB card on Monday, a 10% hike on Wednesday, and a memory shortage with no end date attached. If you’ve been circling a GPU purchase and telling yourself you’ll decide next month, next month is the part that’s about to cost more.