Report says motherboard manufacturers are in crisis as builders aren't building new rigs as much anymore

A new report suggests motherboard manufacturers are in a bad state right now, with the memory crisis and the Iran war affecting all kinds of PC hardware. As PC builders are disincentivised from, well, building PCs, the motherboards needed for them also get left behind.

The report, from Digitimes, notes a "collapse" for many motherboard manufacturers, claiming it is worse than previous financial crises and the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic. It notes that MSI, Gigabyte and ASRock are all expected to see declines in 2026, in regard to motherboard sales. As of the time of writing, motherboard sales figures for 2026 are not yet public.

The first element of this collapse is the memory crisis. As AI is intent on sucking all that memory for it to run, those looking to buy new DRAM kits are now paying a steep premium. Some simply won't and will hang on for it to go down. This memory crisis also hits other elements of a PC, like graphics cards, making them harder to buy at MSRP.

Jese Martinez from custom PC company PowerGPU recently affirmed the same to me, arguing, "it's memory, it's storage, it's multiple things that are happening. And it's not just a few 100 bucks. Stuff is going up twice the price or three times the price."

Naturally, if the price of components is stopping people from being able to upgrade, there's no point in buying a motherboard for the day it eventually goes back down. If the crisis lasts beyond 2027, one might assume they'd prefer to wait for the latest thing anyway.

However, that's not the only factor in this crisis. Digitimes notes that interest in Nvidia's RTX 50 series line of graphics cards is lower, too, due to a lack of updates and upgrades since the start of the year. We haven't seen the rumoured RTX 50 Super series yet, and it's unclear if we will, either. The report argues, "The mid-to-high-end gaming PC market lacks technical specifications that stimulate upgrades."

Digitimes claims that Asus, the industry leader in motherboards, sold 15 million units in 2025, but shipped just 5 million in the first half of 2026, indicating a steep drop for this year. It goes on to suggest that Asus is aiming for 10 million in total for 2026, which is apparently the lowest number of shipments in over a decade.

This doesn't necessarily mean the companies are in trouble, though. Asus' March earnings call argues its high-end brand value and shift to AI would help it weather the memory crisis. Gigabyte and ASRock, similarly, are looking to make money from AI. Though AI is arguably the biggest factor in the downturn of the motherboard market, it is also a money-making machine, responsible for Nvidia being worth $5 trillion. The main group that will be affected by this are the buyers, but AI doesn't seem to really care about them.