On Thursday, Hardware Unboxed reported that Asus is winding down production of its RTX 5070 Ti, saying, Asus “explicitly told us this model is currently facing a supply shortage and, as such, they have placed the model into end-of-life status.” They added that the same applies to Asus’s 16GB RTX 5060 Ti, and mentioned how retailers in Australia have had trouble sourcing the product.
Nvidia’s director of global public relations for GeForce, Ben Berraondo, confirmed in a statement to The Verge that it’s still producing these GPUs: “Demand for GeForce RTX GPUs is strong, and memory supply is constrained. We continue to ship all GeForce SKUs and are working closely with our suppliers to maximize memory availability.”
Hardware Unboxed specified in a follow-up post that this only applies to Asus, and added, “Whether or not AIBs actually receive enough supply to justify continued production is another question. Asus don’t seem to think so.” Asus did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Verge.
This may not be the case for all manufacturers. For instance, PNY public relations representative Michael Farino confirmed to The Verge that the Dual-Slot Slim (DSS) RTX 5070 Ti, which was just announced at CES, is still on track to “start shipping [in] February, and will be at all the usual retail suspects,” including Best Buy, Micro Center, and Amazon.
Unfortunately, it’s not surprising to see constraints hitting the more affordable versions of 50-series GPUs first. Christopher Moore, Micron’s VP of marketing, mobile and client business unit, said to Wccftech last week that “What we’re doing now is trying to run as few pieces of silicon as possible to max out, few differentiated DIDs as possible to max out the output… We’re saying, you know, I know you used to wanna go from 12 gigabyte to 16 gigabyte, or 16 gigabyte to 24 gigabyte. Those changes actually drop our output. So we’re working with them to try and get our demand as steady as possible so that we can get our supply as steady as possible and maximize the output.”