Quote of the day by NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang: “Moore’s law is dead. It’s completely over” — Will GPUs ever be affordable again?
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has declared Moore’s Law definitively dead, stating that the principle—which predicted computing power would double at the same cost every 18 months—no longer holds true. In a 2022 statement, Huang emphasized the shift: “The ability for Moore’s Law to deliver twice the performance at the same cost, or at the same performance and half the cost, every year and a half is over. It’s completely over.”
Moore’s Law, named after Intel co-founder Gary Moore, has guided semiconductor development and consumer expectations for over five decades. Its end marks a fundamental industry transition driven by the physical and economic challenges of scaling chip manufacturing at the nanometer level, combined with surging demand for advanced processors and GPUs.
For consumers, the implications are substantial. High-end graphics cards, including NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 40 Series, now command astronomical prices, making cutting-edge PC gaming hardware increasingly unaffordable. Unlike the historical pattern where performance gains accompanied cost reductions or price stability, the current market shows premium performance exclusively at premium price points.
This shift means the era of predictable exponential performance improvements paired with declining costs has ended. The PC-building community faces a prolonged period of expensive components, fundamentally changing the economics of hardware upgrades and affecting accessibility to high-performance computing. The gap between affordable and cutting-edge hardware will likely persist as manufacturing improvements slow and demand for AI-accelerated and specialized computing accelerates.