Motherboard sales are now collapsing amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI

Motherboard sales 'collapse' by more than 25% as chipmakers strangle enthusiast PC market to build more AI chips — Asus projected to sell 5 million fewer boards in 2025, Gigabyte, MSI, and ASRock also expected to see reduced sales numbers Fewer people are buying parts and building new PCs from scratch.

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Motherboard sales are now collapsing amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI, causing prices for many major PC components to rise across the board during the past six months, with memory modules and storage drives leading the way.

Now those shortages are being exacerbated by chipmakers, like Nvidia, Intel, and AMD, reducing production of consumer chips so they can manufacture more AI processors.

The AI infrastructure buildout is also causing shortages for Intel and AMD CPUs (and even high-end Macs), especially as interest in agentic AI is going through the roof.

Because of this, users who don’t have deep pockets are putting off upgrading their PCs and holding on to their current devices longer.

Motherboard manufacturers have begun to feel the effects of these delayed purchases, with Digitimes [machine translated] reporting that the four major firms are revising their target sales downward.

Asus, which sold 15 million motherboards in 2025, has only shipped a little more than 5 million in the first half of 2026.

It’s expected that the company will have to push hard for it to even move 10 million units by the end of the year, marking a 33% decrease in sales year-on-year.

Gigabyte and MSI sold 11.5 million and 11 million motherboards last year, respectively.

However, both companies have revised their internal forecasts for 2026 to 9 million (Gigabyte) and 8.4 million (MSI), a 22% drop for the former and a 24% contraction for the latter.

ASRock will be hardest hit by the situation, with the company’s shipments projected to fall by 37%, from 4.3 million in 2025 to just 2.7 million by the end of the year.

This marks a contraction of 28% for the overall motherboard market, at least for the big four manufacturers.

AI’s demand for memory, storage, and processors is the primary driver for this drop in sales.

Shortages that have been caused by their massive purchases have forced PC builders and enthusiasts to fight over a smaller pie of PC components, resulting in higher overall prices for these components.

Aside from this, AMD continues to use the AM5 socket for its latest processors, while Intel's Nova Lake, which will reportedly use LGA 1954, isn’t available until later this year.

The situation is further compounded by Nvidia not releasing a refreshed RTX 50 Super series this year, while rumors claim that the RTX 60 series will not debut until 2028.