It appears that Nvidia has seen the amount of cash it must pay out for faulty GPUs rise by more than 1,000 per cent.
According to Warranty Week from 2024 to 2025, Nvidia saw its warranty claims paid jump 1000 per cent. AMD’s claims paid increased 116 per cent.
The numbers were ugly enough to justify a closer look at the discrete GPU racket. Warranty claims, accruals, and reserves increased by about an order of magnitude from 2024 to 2025.
Crypto mining counts as commercial use and voids the warranty for Nvidia and AMD cards. Running AI is generally treated as normal use, depending on how hard you hammer the silicon, and modding the card can still make vendors twitchy.
Nvidia and AMD have the discrete GPU market stitched up. Nvidia held more than 90 per cent of the market through 2025, according to Jon Peddie Research, while AMD sat at about seven per cent by the end of 2025.
Warranty Week could not find any data on Intel’s warranty expenses, as Chipzilla does not disclose them in its financial reports, despite being publicly traded.
In recent months, discrete GPU prices have risen across the market thanks to the current RAM shortage. The AI boom has kicked off an absurd surge in demand for memory-related silicon, and RAM prices quadrupled from mid-2025 to early 2026.
This shortage is pushing up prices for anything with memory chips and integrated graphics, including PCs and consoles, and it is expected to bite phones, appliances, medical gear and car entertainment. It is going to make GPU repairs pricier too, which feeds straight into warranty costs.
AMD’s warranty claims costs doubled from $110 million in 2024 to $238 million in 2025.
Nvidia paid $81 million in claims in 2024 and $894 million in 2025, which is a 1000 per cent jump, or 11 times more cash blown on fixes.
Quarterly details show Nvidia paid $147 million in the first quarter of 2025, $80 million in the second, and $156 million in the third. The fourth quarter is where things went sideways, with claims costs surging to $511 million.
That spike makes Nvidia’s older blip in 2009 to 2011 look tame. That earlier bump came from a large recall after it found integrated GPUs made for the Fruity Cargo Cult Apple, HP and Dell laptops between May 2007 and September 2008 were defective.
Nvidia’s limited warranties for end-users run from one to three years. AIC partners using Nvidia chips, such as PNY, sell “warranty extensions” that extend coverage to five years.
Nvidia sells extended warranties on a small number of products. PNY has its own extended warranty scheme called the “Nvidia RTX Long-Life Program,” and retailers and TPAs flog coverage too, including Micro Centre and Best Buy.
AMD reports warranty expenses annually rather than quarterly, and it posted a claims rate of 0.69 per cent in 2025.
In 2024, AMD’s claims rate was 0.43 per cent, so the rate rose by roughly two-thirds year on year. That is a lot of extra warranty pain without even needing a crisis headline.
Nvidia’s claims rate was 0.17 per cent in the first quarter of 2025 and rose through the year to 0.90 per cent in the fourth quarter. From the fourth quarter of 2024 to the fourth quarter of 2025, its claims rate increased ninefold.
