EVGA, often considered Nvidia’s top add-in-board partner, is making a drastic shift. It’s done doing business with Nvidia and will stop making GPUs altogether. That’s according to YouTube channels JayZTwoCents and GamersNexus, which both sat down with EVGA CEO Andrew Han to discuss his frustrations with Nvidia as a partner and reasoning for making the decision.
“We are not going to be on [Nvidia CEO] Jensen [Huang]’s lap on stage, so I don’t want people to speculate what’s going on [when we’re not there],” GamersNexus Steve Burke quotes Han as saying. “EVGA has decided not to carry the next gen.”
Representatives from EVGA and Nvidia haven’t yet responded to requests for comment. We’ve only heard from EVGA’s side of the story, and while much of the conflict may be true, we’ve yet to hear anything from its former partner. Its notable that Han met with two of the biggest tech YouTubers and had the videos embargoed, so there may be more to the story.
EVGA will reportedly continue the existing RTX 30-series product line until it runs out of stock. The company won’t be moving to partner with AMD or Intel, either, with plans to instead focus on other products for the foreseeable future (EVGA already makes power supplies, coolers and motherboards, for instance), but also reportedly won’t expand into new product categories.
The company has reportedly withheld some stock for the market for the purposes of replacing cards in warranty, which should protect current customers, at least for a while.
Han told JayZTwoCents and GamersNexus that EVGA won’t be selling the business. GamersNexus states that Nvidia’s top brass were first notified in April. Apparently, EVGA did make some RTX 40-series cards that made it as far as the engineering sample stage, however.
It’s unclear how EVGA will keep its employees together. It’s not a huge company, and while the GamersNexus video suggests Han said he wants to take care of employees, it’s unclear what some of these engineers will have to do.
Both videos suggest that EVGA feel that Nvidia has stifled it, and suggest they don’t find out details like MSRP, costs to buy GPU chips and more until Nvidia announces them, often publicly on stage. There is also talk of price ceilings as well as not being able to customize cards by changing the specs, like adding more memory.
It’s also an issue because Nvidia is competing against partners with its own Founders Edition cards, both videos say, because Nvidia, as the supplier and manufacturer, doesn’t have to worry about profit margins as much.
EVGA has built its reputation on delivering some of the best Nvidia GPU AIB cards. In fact, the VGA stands for video graphics adapter, which is odd for a company that no longer makes them.
This story is developing and will be updated with more detail.