Nvidia's GPU warranty claims cost the company nearly $1 billion in 2025.

Due to soaring VRAM prices, graphics card repair costs have skyrocketed, affecting both Nvidia GeForce and AMD Radeon GPUs.

Ironically, the soaring costs of VRAM and other graphics card components, largely driven by the massive demand for Nvidia GPUs, may have come back to haunt the company. According to a new report, the cost of processing Nvidia GPU warranty claims has increased by over 1,000% over the past year, costing the company nearly $1 billion.

More importantly, this is a massive increase compared to the amount Nvidia paid out in warranty claims for its best graphics cards last year, which was just $81 million.

These figures come from a report by Warranty Week, 'a newsletter for warranty management professionals'. After years of tracking warranty payouts for the GPU sector, the company discovered a significant increase in its latest report, covering the period up to the end of 2025, and stressed that this 'is so noteworthy that it prompted us to take a closer look at the industry this week'.

The most striking figure is $894 million, and the fact that it's more than ten times higher than the previous year's warranty costs. However, you might think this is explained by the surge in demand for Nvidia GPUs and the increase in revenue; if sales increase tenfold, then warranty costs can also increase accordingly. However, Warranty Week also calculated the warranty ratio, showing warranty costs versus revenue, and according to this indicator, Nvidia's warranty costs show a much higher increase than revenue. In 2024, this ratio was 0.1%, but by 2025 it had increased eightfold to 0.9%, suggesting there may have been a real increase in the number of warranty claims, as well as their costs.

Nvidia isn't the only company seeing an increase in warranty costs; AMD also experienced a significant shift. However, its warranty costs only doubled, from $110 million in 2024 to $238 million in 2025. Furthermore, AMD's warranty claims rate only increased by 75%, from 0.4% to 0.7%. While these are relatively small changes, it's worth noting that AMD typically has a much higher warranty claims rate than Nvidia, hovering around 0.5%. Nvidia's rate, meanwhile, is usually below 0.1%, with two sharp increases: one at the end of 2022 and another last year.

What remains unclear in this report is the impact of recent VRAM price increases on warranty claim costs. The time period considered for total warranty costs only begins from the end of last year when VRAM prices started rising. However, the warranty rate chart, broken down by quarter, correlates strongly with the timing of the rapid increase in VRAM prices, although this does not seem to explain the full extent of the change in total costs.

It is also unclear whether the issues with the RTX 5090 cards melting plastic have affected warranty rates. Since a similar problem also affected the RTX 4090, and there is no strong correlation between launch date and increased warranty rates, this suggests it is not a major factor.