Filipino PC builders and gamers are absorbing another round of sticker shock this year, as graphics card prices at local retailers climb well beyond what buyers paid just months ago, and significantly much more than last year. Depending on the model and retailer, increases have ranged from roughly 10% to upwards of 40%, part of a worldwide price shock rippling out from a severe shortage of the memory chips that go into every modern GPU.

The root cause is AI companies buying in massive bulks from manufacturers, creating a strong demand for these products, which then straps the price tag of these memory products to a rocket ship set to fly outside the Solar System's orbit. Video memory chips (GDDR6/GDDR7) used on graphics cards, has been building since late 2025 as manufacturers like Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron redirect production capacity toward high-bandwidth memory (HBM) for AI data-center chips.

That squeeze has already prompted board partners such as Asus, MSI, and Gigabyte to raise prices on their Nvidia GeForce RTX 50-series and AMD Radeon RX 9000-series cards, with hikes reported in the 10 to 15 percent range depending on VRAM capacity, and AMD reportedly planning to add roughly $10 in cost for every 8GB of video memory on its cards.

Local price-tracking sites and builder communities describe a market where prices are shifting faster than shoppers can keep up. Local retailers including PC Express, EasyPC, and DynaQuest PC have been adjusting listed prices to reflect rising acquisition costs from distributors. Some GPUs have already hit as much as 70K PHP.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has publicly said the memory shortage is likely to persist "quite a few years," giving gamers and PC enthusiasts the bad news.