NVIDIA Founders Edition is hurting AIB partners

Industry sources heard by DigiTimes believe NVIDIA's effort to push its Founders Edition video cards will have an adverse impact on the profitability of the company's add-in board partners in 2017 and beyond. The site says NVIDIA is competing against its own partners because the company desires a larger slice of the earnings pie.

Calculations from the site point out that NVIDIA's top six partners earned a profit of around $159.5 million in 2016, which is just a tenth of what NVIDIA pulled in over the last four quarters;

While supplying GPUs to graphics card makers, including Taiwan-based Asustek Computer, Gigabyte Technology, Micro-Star International (MSI), Palit Microsystems, Hong Kong-based Zotac and China-based Colorful, Nvidia is also competing with these clients in the PC-use graphics card market, noted the sources.

Excluding Nvidia, the sum of profits earned by the world's top-six graphics card suppliers totaled about NT$5 billion (US$159.49 million) in 2016, encouraging Nvidia to step into the segment to slice part of the growing earnings, said the sources.