One Graphics Card, Three Prices, and a Red “Sold” Stamp: The Day AI Servers Hijacked the PC Market

Saturday, July 26, 2026. Caoxi North Road, Xuhui District, Shanghai. A small PC assembly shop that has been open for eight years.

The owner, Zhou, pulled a freshly printed price label for the RTX 5070 from the printer. He glanced at it, slid it back, picked up a black marker, and hand-wrote a number: 5999. Then, with a red pen, he circled the inventory column and added: “Only 2 pieces left.”

Three hours earlier, he had received a call from his upstream distributor: “Nvidia has notified all AIC partners to halt shipments. New pricing is pending, but you can quote customers based on the new memory costs.” The distributor gave him a number. Zhou did the math and crossed out the original label—4799.

This wasn’t a pre–Singles’ Day sales gimmick. Zhou flipped through his purchase records: in early July, the wholesale price for the same card was 4,150 yuan. Now, for that very card, the memory cost alone had gone up by nearly a thousand yuan.

How did the memory get so expensive?

Zhou doesn’t understand semiconductors, but he could read the cost breakdown sheet sent by his master distributor. The sheet showed that for an 8 GB card, the memory cost alone had risen by $76—about 515 yuan. For 12 GB, the increase was $114, or 772 yuan. For 16 GB, it reached $152, just over 1,031 yuan.

Those figures came from the latest quotes from the world’s three major memory manufacturers. In the first half of this year, Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron gradually converted their GDDR6 and GDDR7 production lines to HBM—high-bandwidth memory used in AI servers, which generates four to five times the profit margin of consumer-grade graphics memory. A single production line switch takes 12 months, and AI clients had already locked in capacity for the next two years. Consumer-grade memory supply has been shrinking by 8% to 12% each month since the second quarter.

Less supply meant higher unit prices. A single 3 GB GDDR7 chip, which was priced at just over $20 at the start of the year, jumped to $60–70. Nvidia did not absorb the increase. Instead, it passed the new “GPU + memory” kit price directly to AIC partners and instructed all brands to pause shipments and re‑quote uniformly.

As a result, the RTX 5070 climbed from the 4,000-yuan tier into the 6,000-yuan range. The RTX 5060 moved from 2,000 to above 2,500. Even the RTX 5050—an entry‑level card meant for “it just runs,” went from 2,100 to 3,083 yuan. Zhou said a student came in yesterday to ask about the 5050. After hearing the price, he paused for two seconds, then said, “I’ll think about it.”

And it wasn’t just graphics cards.

Zhou pulled open a drawer and took out a purchase invoice for a DDR5 32 GB memory kit. In December last year, it cost 480 yuan. Last month, it rose to 1,050 yuan. This week, the distributor quoted 1,450 yuan. “Memory started climbing even earlier than graphics cards, but nobody was watching,” Zhou said. At the stall next door selling SSDs, a 1 TB PCIe 4.0 drive had gone from 320 yuan to 1,100 yuan—a jump of over 240%. The reason was the same: manufacturers had shifted capacity to enterprise‑grade SSDs.

Even CPUs weren’t spared. Intel’s distributor notified a batch of processor price increases earlier this month—only 5% to 8%, but when stacked together, a mid‑range desktop build now cost nearly 4,000 yuan more than at the start of the year.

Three customers made three different decisions.

At 2 p.m., a young video editor walked in, glanced at the price, didn’t haggle, and scanned the QR code to take the 5,999-yuan 5070. “I’ve got work piling up. Can’t wait,” he said.

At 3 p.m., a gamer hesitated between the 5070 and 5060 for ten minutes. He finally decided on the 5060—only to find that it too had risen to 2,580 yuan, 500 yuan more than what he’d seen last week. He pulled out his phone, checked a second‑hand platform, sighed, and said, “Forget it. I’ll hold on to my 1060 for another six months.”

At 4:30, a bespectacled college student deleted the entire desktop build from his shopping cart—5,600 yuan was only enough for a single 5070. He pulled out his phone and reserved a PlayStation 5. “At least that price doesn’t change every day,” he said.

“What about the future?”

Zhou locked the remaining graphics cards in a cabinet and wiped down the empty shelves with a rag. He said the distributor had told him this price surge wasn’t temporary—new memory fabs would take at least two years to come online, while AI demand kept climbing. “I’ve been in the DIY business for over a decade. The crypto boom was crazy too, but that was speculative—once the tide went out, prices dropped. This time it’s different. The source is at the chipmakers. If they don’t turn back, prices won’t come down.”

He cleared the empty shelf and placed case fans on it. “The profit margin on fans is thin, but at least I don’t have to change the price tag every day.”

That evening, Zhou posted a photo on his Moments—the price tag paper he had crossed out three times. The final number read 5999, and next to it, “Sold.” He did not add any caption.