The past year has proven unexpectedly turbulent for Nvidia, as the company faces off against an unusually large number of warranty claims for its discrete graphics cards. Worse still for Nvidia, the cost of honouring these warranties has grown exponentially, to just shy of $1B.
These observations come from Warranty Week, a newsletter on warranty management systems with over two decades of experience, following analysis of annual and quarterly financial statements from the past several years. Its findings show that, while 2025 as a whole was difficult for Nvidia in terms of warranty payments, the final quarter of the year was especially troublesome.
Diving into the figures, Nvidia paid out $894M in warranty claims last year. That’s a massive 1,000% increase relative to the $81M spent in 2024. Q4 2025 accounts for the majority of this expenditure, at $511M (57%).
While such an increase in spending naturally raises eyebrows, these figures don’t mean much without further context. For starters, thanks to the AI boom, Nvidia’s production volume is huge now compared to before, and simple maths tells you that a large increase in production will correspond with a similarly large boost in warranty claims. The ongoing DRAM shortage won’t help either, as the increasing costs of memory push up the price of repairs and swap-outs.
Warranty Week also provides claim rates as part of its analysis, which illustrate warranty claims relative to sales. Examining the chart, rates rose from 0.17% in Q1 2025 to 0.90% by Q4, in effect quadrupling over the year. While this is a large increase, we’re still talking about <1% of graphics cards requiring some form of repair or replacement.
Comparing these figures to AMD, whose claim rates remained at a steady 0.69% for the year, Nvidia isn’t doing massively worse than its rival. In fact, prior to the Q4 2025 result, it was the more reliable brand, albeit by fractions of a percent.
The GeForce RTX 50 series era has been far from perfect, with some cards missing ROPs from the factory, while plenty of GeForce driver problems continue to cause problems even in 2026. That’s not forgetting the many reports of 12V-2X6 power connector damage.
However, it’s strange that Nvidia has faced such a disproportionately large increase in warranty claims relative to sales later in the series’ lifespan. I’m curious to see whether this just a temporary spike or if more graphics card owners continue to exercise their warranty.
If you’re hungry for more graphics card chat, check out our picks of the best GPUs you can pop inside your PC today.
