Hardware manufacturer AMD has admitted to purposefully undershipping its products in order to inflate prices. While its rival Nvidia received great success from constant sell-out products, AMD attempted to emulate the company’s low-stock-high-demand through 2022.
AMD CEO Lisa Su revealed that the company has been limiting supplies of its products to seem more popular. With manufacturing of chips returning to normal and cryptocurrency mining all-but-dead, the hardware company will continue to undership.
Via PC Gamer, Lisa Su revealed that the company undershipped products across the past two quarters. Furthermore, it will continue to do so in 2023, depending on its success rate.
“We have been undershipping the sell-through or consumption for the last two quarters," Su told investors. “We undershipped in Q3, we undershipped in Q4. We will undership, to a lesser extent, in Q1."
It’s worth noting that the phrase undershipping does not mean AMD is making less GPUs than usual. Instead, the manufacturer is making the same number of units while restricting their flow into retail markets. This makes the product seem like it’s more in demand, causing prices to stay stable instead of facing reductions.
The GPU companies move to keep its hardware selling at top prices comes after years of losing to Nvidia. At the time of writing, Nvidia commands a 79% ownership of the dedicated GPU market compared to AMD’s 20%. Intel makes up just 1% of market share.
However, it is, at the very least, disingenuous to consumers to manipulate prices. With new Nvidia cards offering better raytracing as well as DLSS 3.0 technology, there are less and less reasons to buy into Radeon GPUs.
Nevertheless, the company has yet to completely give in to Nvidia. Not only is the company the go-to company for console SoCs, but the company’s development on FidelityFX technology could allow it to catch up on GPU performance. However, it’s still a long journey to take on the behemoth that it Nvidia.