Nvidia spent 1003% more on warranty claims in 2025 than the year before according to a new report, with the total cost almost reaching $900 million

Of all the places you expect to find a glimpse into the world of GPU manufacturing, a trade newsletter for 'warrant management professionals' is surely the most unlikely of them all. But thanks to some diligent reporting and interesting charts, we now know that in 2025, Nvidia paid out almost $900 million in warranty claims. Ten times higher than the previous year.

It was the sharp eyes over at Videocardz that spotted Warranty Week's report, and after a lengthy breakdown of the GPU industry for readers who know nothing on the topic, we get hit with a simple chart. It simply shows the total expenditure on paid claims by AMD and Nvidia, as gleaned from financial reports.

Last year, the figure was around $894 million for Team Green and approximately $238 million for Team Red. The figures are for any product deemed a 'discrete GPU', so think graphics cards (gaming and workstation), AI accelerators, and laptop graphics chips. Nvidia sells considerably more GPUs than AMD and Intel, and this is reflected in the difference in claim totals.

However, you only have to look at the 2024 numbers to see that something changed massively in the space of a single year. Back then, AMD and Nvidia paid out fairly similar amounts: $110 million and $81 million, respectively. So why are the 2025 numbers so much bigger? 1003% bigger in Nvidia's case.

Warranty Week points out that, for most of 2025, Nvidia's claim payouts weren't anything out of the ordinary. For the first three months, the total was $147 million, followed by $80 million in the next quarter, before climbing back up to $156 million in the third quarter. It was the last three months of 2025 that things went bananas, with the cost of warranty claims reaching $511 million in total.

One might be tempted to point a finger at Meltygate, i.e. the incidents of RTX graphics cards with melted 12VHPWR connectors, as being the primary cause for this, but that's unlikely to make much difference here. Discrete GPU-based products often come with multi-year warranties, so a number of these claims will be for cards that were purchased well before 2025.

What we're really looking at is the fact that graphics cards and other GPU products sharply rose in price during that period (and continued doing so well into 2026).

That said, the second chart from Warranty Week shows that Nvidia's claim rates notably increased in the second half of 2025, starting at around 0.2% for Q1 and Q2, increasing to a little over 0.3% in Q3, and then jumping to 0.9% in the final quarter. Compared to 2024, Nvidia's final claim rate last year was 800% greater.

Picking apart why the figure is so much larger is a bit of a puzzle. One thing to note, though, is that both GPU vendors released a lot more products in 2025, compared to 2024. AMD, for example, only launched nine new GPUs two years ago (and only one of those was a gaming graphics card), whereas last year, it churned out 23 different models across every discrete GPU sector.

It wasn't such a drastic difference for Nvidia, but it still released more stuff in 2025 than in 2024, and it also flooded the gaming graphics card market last year with a wealth of RTX 50-series models. With so many different SKUs from a multitude of vendors, and the sheer number of AI accelerators sold last year, it's perhaps not surprising that there was such a notable jump in warranty claims.

Only AMD and Nvidia will know for sure why the number of claims increased so much in 2025, but if you were one such case, then at least you can take comfort in knowing that you weren't alone in doing so.