Epic CEO Tim Sweeney has warned that rising graphics memory prices could threaten the gaming PC market in the near future.
He explained that computer and mobile companies cannot compete with the prices paid by artificial intelligence giants such as NVIDIA, Google, and Meta to develop their own graphics processors and data centers. This was evident in the price of a 64GB memory module from Crucial rising from $240 to about $500 within one month.
This coincides with Nvidia’s willingness to pay about $500 per unit for the HBM4 memory coming from Samsung and SK Hynix in 2026, which is double the cost of the previous generation. Insiders explained that the high demand for HBM4 forced Samsung to raise prices, which may also lead to an increase in the prices of Nvidia cards.
In terms of specifications, Samsung has redesigned the interface and modules of the HBM4, bringing the transfer speed to 3.3 TB/s for the 36GB module, compared to 1.2 TB/s in the HBM3E.
SK Hynix also confirmed the specifications of its LPDDR6 and GDDR7 modules, which offer much faster speeds of up to 48 Gbit/s per pin for GDDR7, targeting gaming and artificial intelligence.
These technologies are expected to be launched at the ISSCC conference in February, with Samsung starting to supply HBM4 to Nvidia in the second quarter of 2026, which could raise graphics card prices significantly.
