Nintendo Loses Its Main Chip Supplier as Tech Memory Shortage Hits Game Cartridges

The global tech memory crunch is finally coming for physical video game cartridges. Macronix, the primary manufacturer of ROM chips for Nintendo game cartridges, announced in its third-quarter earnings report that its production of the chips has reached its end and it will gradually decouple from the gaming industry.

The company is pivoting wafer space toward more lucrative NOR- and NAND-based memory to feed insatiable AI industry demand. This shift leaves Nintendo scrambling for alternatives. While analyst David Gibson notes that Macronix served as the main memory chip maker for physical cartridges, that specific production line shrank 39 percent in the past year.

Nintendo must now rely more heavily on alternate suppliers like Rohm and Lapis Semiconductor. Production capacity remains bottlenecked, and building new factories takes over a year, meaning less profitable ROM chips are getting squeezed out entirely. Nintendo insists it has no plans to ditch physical games, but the supply chain squeeze carries obvious financial consequences.

Physical cartridges already cost publishers more to produce than digital downloads, a pricing gap that widened earlier this year.

Our read is that rising manufacturing overhead will inevitably force publishers to pass cartridge costs directly to consumers or abandon physical media altogether, accelerating an industry-wide slide toward digital-only libraries.