There’s never been a better time to ditch Nvidia GPUs

But between the anti-competitive mess with the GeForce Partner Program, the way the company cloaked how much money it was making off the crypto bubble (which got so bad shareholders filed a lawsuit), and now the incredible shortage of high-end GeForce GPUs due to the AI boom, I just don’t feel good about giving Nvidia money anymore.

And hey, the company doesn’t need my money anyway. These days Nvidia is raking it in selling high-end hardware for AI data centers and so the widespread complaints about the company “manufacturing” its own shortage of high-end graphics cards don’t really hold water with me.

Not because it’s not true—good luck finding an RTX 5090 for less than the price of a used car these days—but because Nvidia is a public company motivated to make money for itself and its shareholders, so of course it’s going to focus on serving the customers who are most willing to pay for its high-end hardware: AI companies.

I know I’ve written about Nvidia’s declining interest in PC gaming before, but I enjoyed some fresh perspective on the topic courtesy of this week’s episode of The Full Nerd. The crew ended up spending a fair bit of time discussing allegations that the company is stuffing bundles of high-end hardware into AI data centers before the centers are operational, potentially leaving piles of unused graphics cards gathering dust.

I encourage you to listen to the full episode for their thoughts, but for my part I’m sure it’s more complicated than that because it seems highly unlikely the hardware Nvidia sells for AI server racks can be easily repurposed and slotted into your next gaming PC build. If there’s anything to be upset about, it’s that Nvidia has likely been putting more and more of its resources into its data center business for years now—and less and less into producing PC gaming hardware.

That doesn’t look likely to change anytime soon unless the AI boom busts so badly that Nvidia’s data center business craters, which is why I think there’s never been a better time to stop trying to buy Nvidia GPUs. I’m trying to scrounge up the parts to build a new mini-ITX gaming rig early next year and, despite my DLSS addiction, I think the next graphics card I buy is going to be from AMD—before it too leans so hard into serving AI companies and data centers that desktop GPUs become an afterthought.