AMD claims it has 45% gaming GPU market share in Japan but jokingly admits it ‘isn’t used to selling graphics cards’

An AMD spokesperson has claimed that Radeon gaming graphics cards now have 45% market share in Japan. This appears to be something of a surprise to the AMD rep, referred to as Mr. Sato, who said that the company, “isn’t used to selling graphics cards”. Er, righto…!

According to Japanese website ASCII (via Google translate), AMD was attending an “influencer” event alongside several AIB partners including ASRock, Asus, Gigabyte and PowerColor when the 45% market share claim was made. Reportedly, however, those board partners expressed concern about future sales due to limited GPU supply.

Despite that, the ASRock rep, referred to as Mr. Haraguchi, aspired to even greater market share for AMD. “We’re below the majority. We’re the opposition party, so let’s aim for 70%,” he said.

While we can’t verify AMD’s claims, they do stand to reason. Such has been the paucity of availability of Nvidia’s new RTX 50-series graphics cards, at least by any metric to which we are aware, that it’s hard to imagine that AMD isn’t making pretty major inroads into Nvidia’s market share.

In fact, it would be easy to believe that AMD has been selling more graphics cards since the launch of its new Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT GPUs than Nvidia currently is with its pretty much impossible to buy RTX 50-series cards.

Of course, the new AMD pairing haven’t even been on sale for fully two weeks and AMD’s very recent successes are arguably as much about pure availability as a clear competitive advantage. Nvidia GPUs supplies seem to be so low, that almost any reasonable level of AMD availability is bound to be greater.

All of that could change in a flash should Nvidia pull out the stops on RTX 50 production and actually inject decent volume into the GPU market. So, it will be interesting to see later this year when various market research outfits publish figures just where AMD and Nvidia’s market share end up.

JPR’s most recent figures, by way of example, put AMD at 17% for the last quarter of 2024, up by 7%, which obviously predated the release of the new AMD cards. The first quarter of 2025 which runs until the end of March will likewise largely exclude sales of those GPUs. So, it will be Q2 2025 where we’ll really get a feel for any medium to long term market share gains for AMD.

It’s hard to imagine AMD won’t further substantial gains in the next few quarters. But as the data we posted in that JPR story demonstrates, AMD’s market share has been consistently on the slide since as far back as 2005, almost regardless of the quality of its graphics offerings. Will this time actually be any different?