NVIDIA CEO Comments On EVGA's Breakup And What It Means For The GPU Market
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang answered some questions from investors and reporters in the wake of his GTC keynote. One of the seismic industry events just ahead of all the Ada Lovelace news was the split with long-standing partner EVGA. Naturally, there were reporters at the Q&A that came fishing for Huang’s first official comments on what appeared to have been a sudden schism but was reportedly fermenting for years in the background.
NVIDIA news is very hot right now, with the recent launch of the GeForce RTX 40 series of graphics cards, debates about pricing, release schedules, partner designs, and underlying technologies like DLSS 3.0. Yesterday, we put together a pretty extensive roundup of all the NVIDIA AIB partner cards and highlighted any outstanding efforts, but one major player was missing - EVGA. This leads to the big question over whether EVGA will be missed—the Q&A answer delivered by the NVIDIA CEO could be very briefly paraphrased as “not really.”
“The market has a lot of great players. And it'll be served well after EVGA,” said Jensen Huang, in answer to PC Gamer’s Jacob Ridley, during the Q&A session. Huang added some warmth to that rather cold sounding statement, mentioning that Andrew Han and EVGA were great partners, and it was sad to see them leave the market. Revealingly, Huang admitted he had known about the EVGA’s boss’s wishes to wind down the GPU business “for a couple of years.”
As we reported shortly after the big breakup, EVGA’s decision surely wasn’t taken lightly, with its commanding presence in the US market. However, business is business and rather than water down the EVGA offer which combined winning custom cooler design, long warranties, and customer programs like ‘step-up,’ the decision was made to step back from this particular PC component market. The economic advantages enjoyed by bigger players such as ASUS, Gigabyte and MSI ended up being telling, too. Surely, NVIDIA rather blatantly creaming the top off the market with Founder Edition cards during recent generations was another one of the sparks behind the burned-out relationship.
At the time of writing, we still have no official direction from EVGA about what it will replace its NVIDIA GPU business with (if anything). However, its big-name overclocking partner, Vince ‘Kingpin’ Lucido, indicated he was open to rival GPU brand partnerships in a recent Facebook update.
