Even AMD is surprised by how fast it’s gaining on Nvidia

AMD’s RX 9000 series quickly joined the ranks of the best graphics cards, and it appears that its success came as a surprise to everyone — yes, even AMD itself. At a recent roundtable in Japan, the company revealed that its market share skyrocketed recently, reaching a whopping 45% in Japan. Although this refers to Japan, it’s easy to imagine that AMD is gaining on Nvidia globally, too, although there are a few things to consider here.

AMD’s Yoshiaki Sato and Saki Suzuki shared a couple of updates during a Team AMD Roundtable held in Japan, which was later shared by ASCII. AMD was joined on stage by representatives of its many board partners, including ASRock, Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, PowerColor, and Sapphire. AMD’s add-in board partners (AIBs) reportedly shared that they wanted to make and sell more Radeon graphics cards, but were being held back due to a lack of GPUs. To this, AMD’s Sato replied: “AMD isn’t used to selling [this many] graphics cards.”

This got a laugh from the audience, and I admit, I chuckled, too. It’s a candid response that shows that AMD maybe hasn’t predicted just how much gamers would be willing to embrace its new GPUs.

That 45% market share in Japan is a success, but AMD isn’t resting on its laurels. Sato said that the 45% figure is a “peak” for AMD, but one of its board partners chimed in with: “No, we’re below the majority. We’re the opposition party, so let’s aim for 70%,” which prompted another representative to say: “We’ve never been the ruling party!”

AMD is well aware of its market share compared to its rival, Nvidia. Worldwide figures usually pin AMD at anywhere between 10% and 18% of the GPU market. However, we might see an increase considering that AMD’s RX 9070 GPUs are flying off the shelves … but that might put a stop to its market share gains, too.

Although AMD was able to deliver more stock than Nvidia’s RTX 50-series (which is sometimes referred to as a “paper launch“), the GPUs are largely sold out at many U.S. retailers. When they’re back in stock, they might be more expensive — and that’ll put an end to AMD’s performance-per-dollar argument. Let’s hope that the company can find a middle ground with its board partners and deliver more cards to gamers at MSRP, or at least close to it. It’s clear that the market is finally open to it.