Nvidia rumored to reintroduce GeForce Partner Program for Chinese laptop OEMs, forcing the exclusion of new AMD RX 6000M GPUs from most models

Anti-competitive moves in the PC market today are certainly far less noticeable compared to the early 2000s. Not too long ago, we were hearing that Intel could be incentivizing its partners to somehow slow down production for certain AMD-powered devices like mini PCs and high-end gaming laptops, but this year, such shenanigans are pretty much insignificant compared to the chip shortages affecting entire industries. Despite this problem, everyone is announcing all sorts of new releases at Computex, and it looks like AMD once again stole the show with a keynote that really took many by surprise. Apparently, the new RX 6000M-series of mobile GPUs appears to be very threatening for Nvidia, especially price-wise, and Team Green is rumored to prepare an anti-competitive move to counter AMD, but only on the Chinese market.

Twitter user Bullsh1t_buster reports that Nvidia intends to reintroduce its Nvidia GeForce Partner Program mostly for Chinese laptop OEMs. With this move, Nvidia is essentially forcing all these OEMs to include only Nvidia mobile dGPUs in their laptops. Nvidia previously tried this on the US market, and was swiftly slapped on the wrist by all the major American OEMs. Nvidia now wants to offer significant rebates for its Chinese laptop OEM partners in order to increase their margins. AMD does not really have sufficient funds to incentivize laptop OEMs like this, and on top of that, the supply of RDNA2 mobile GPUs is still affected by the shortages. Nvidia believes the AMD RX 6700M SKU is the most threatening and laptop OEMs are “instructed” to avoid adding this model in their devices. This also happened with the RX 5700M SKUs.

To conclude, Bullsh1t_buster notes that Nvidia is “hijacking” laptop OEMs, promising great rebates and plentiful supply. Moreover, “OEMs are forced to kneel down before NVIDIA. Basically anti-competitive but you can't sue them because region specific.”

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