By Jon Martindale
Publication Date: 2026-04-15 14:08:00
The downside to being the world’s biggest graphics card seller is that sometimes those GPUs go bad, and Nvidia has to cover it. According to WarrantyWeek, Nvidia is now paying out over 11x as much for warranty-returned GPUs as it was two years ago. AMD’s warranty payouts doubled over the same time period.
Nvidia had a 0.17% warranty claim rate for its graphics cards at the start of 2025, but that reached 0.9% by the end of the year. This pulled Nvidia’s warranty rate above AMD’s for the first time in a long time, but AMD increased from 0.4% to 0.7% throughout that same period.
This resulted in both companies paying out a lot more for replacement graphics cards. Nvidia spent $81 million on warranty claims in 2024, but over $894 million in 2025. In contrast, AMD spent $110 million in 2024 and up to $238 million in 2025.
This is a larger jump than either company has had in their history, though AMD’s have risen dramatically since 2019. Nvidia’s best historical analog is in 2009-2011, where it was forced to pay out hundreds of millions of dollars to cover defective laptop GPUs supplied to Apple, HP, and Dell, but even that was a drop in the bucket compared with its 2025 totals.
(Credit: Josh Edelson / AFP via Getty Images)
There were several factors that could have affected this in 2025. Nvidia launched the new RTX 50-series of Blackwell graphics cards at the start of the year. New generations of hardware are always going to spike failure rates as…
