Techies rush to 'hunt' for graphics cards to train AI

The graphics card market in Vietnam is witnessing a profound change in both demand and usage. Once a “victim” of cryptocurrency mining fever leading to scarcity and price inflation, graphics cards (GPUs) are now becoming “strategic weapons” for the wave of artificial intelligence (AI) development.

The AI ​​wave, especially from large language models and imaging and chat applications, is creating strong hardware demand in Vietnam. Since the end of 2022, solutions such as ChatGPT, Dall-E, Midjourney, etc. have continuously attracted attention, causing many companies and individuals to quickly seek GPUs for AI development and testing. The next consumer GPU fever is approaching as AI developers start to buy large quantities of graphics cards originally intended for gamers.

GPUs – once designed primarily for gaming – are now the ideal choice for training AI models, thanks to their ability to process thousands of data streams in parallel.

At the Tech & Game Festival 2025 event held in Hanoi on May 10, Mr. Nguyen The Vuong - Director of Colorful products at distributor Mai Hoang said: "In the past six months, instead of looking to buy graphics cards to mine cryptocurrencies, technology people have switched to 'hunting' for graphics cards to serve AI training."

According to him, many small AI companies have sprung up to collect cards from everywhere, including Vietnam, to bring back to serve AI training. That's why high-end card lines that used to sell for 30-40 million VND, now have increased in price 2-3 times, with some models costing up to hundreds of millions of VND."

Illustrative photo. (Photo: Minh Son/Vietnam+)

Notably, high-capacity gaming cards - which are manufactured for heavy gaming needs - are being used to "train" AI thanks to their more reasonable prices compared to specialized GPUs such as NVIDIA A100 or H100, which are expensive and in short supply.

Unlike crypto, which is prone to cyclical crashes, AI is a long-term race. Hardware demand will continue to increase, while supply cannot expand rapidly. “Therefore, gaming-specific cards with large capacities (16GB or more) are being used to run AI. These models are both 'sufficient' and more economical than dedicated workstation cards," Mr. Vuong explained.

Not only techies are rushing to hunt for GPUs, but professional gamers are also facing the reality that powerful, large-capacity graphics cards are increasingly difficult to buy and expensive.

Predicting the card business trend in the near future, Mr. Vuong said that a clear reality is that graphics cards under 6 million VND are becoming 'extinct.' According to Mr. Vuong, companies like NVIDIA are gradually eliminating low-end models, switching to more powerful models with more VRAM from 8 million VND and up.

"Gamers no longer play at Full HD 60fps resolution but require 2K, 4K, 240fps, even 500fps. Therefore, the card must be stronger, with higher capacity, at least 12GB or 16GB to meet the requirements," he said.

In addition to gaming, ordinary users have also started using free AI software online. This has further increased the demand for high-end graphics cards, to the point where they are difficult to buy, especially genuine ones.

Sharing about the most popular graphics card price segment today, Mr. Vuong said that consumers will be interested in the segment of 8 - 25 million VND. Mr. Vuong also said that there is a clear trend that users are using gaming cards to train AI because of good configuration and reasonable price. However, dedicated graphics cards have more support for Artificial Intelligence./.

Source: https://www.vietnamplus.vn/dan-cong-nghe-do-xo-san-card-do-hoa-de-dao-tao-ai-post1037821.vnp