Macronix Exits ROM Chips, Squeezing Nintendo Cartridge Supply

Macronix, Nintendo's main supplier of cartridge ROM chips, says its ROM production "has reached its end" and that it will begin "gradually decoupling from the game industry." The announcement came in the Taiwanese chipmaker's third-quarter earnings report, as reported by BigGo Finance. For Nintendo, the timing is poor.

The retreat is arithmetic, not sentiment. ROM output has already shrunk 39 percent in the past year and now accounts for just 5 percent of Macronix's business. The wafer space is being redirected toward NOR flash, NAND-based memory, and eMMCs — products that currently command better prices thanks to the AI industry's appetite for storage.

Why can't Macronix just add capacity?

The company's production capacity sits at 25,000 12-inch wafers per month, and that figure is not moving quickly. Macronix has roughly $1.2 billion in planned new capacity, but bringing it online will take a year or more. Until then, every wafer devoted to game cartridges is a wafer not earning memory-market money. A company with finite fab space and a hot product line does not need a strategy committee to reach that conclusion.

Analyst David Gibson notes that Nintendo uses Macronix as its "main memory chip maker" for physical game cartridges. That covers ROM chips inside Nintendo Switch and Switch 2 cartridges — the silicon that stores game data on physical media sold at retail.

What does this mean for Nintendo's physical games?

The immediate risk is supply, not existence. Nintendo has not commented on replacement suppliers, and the source report does not name one. A single dominant supplier exiting a niche product leaves the buyer with three familiar options: pay more, qualify a new vendor, or quietly shift the product mix toward digital distribution.

The shortage also fits a broader pattern. The same memory squeeze that pushed Macronix out of ROM has already driven up prices and stretched availability across RAM, SSDs, GPUs, and even hard drives, as Ars Technica has documented over the past year. Cartridges were simply the last component in line to feel the pressure. Game hardware, it turns out, shares a supply chain with data centers, and the data centers are paying more.

Is the cartridge business worth saving?

For Macronix, plainly not. ROM was 5 percent of revenue and shrinking; NOR and NAND demand is strong enough to crowd it out of a 25,000-wafer-per-month footprint. The $1.2 billion expansion will serve the products that pay for it, and game cartridges are not on that list.

For Nintendo, the question is how much of its cartridge demand can be reallocated before the decoupling completes. The company has given no figures on cartridge volumes or supplier alternatives, so any estimate of impact would be speculation. What is confirmed is the supplier's direction: out, gradually, and on a schedule set by wafer economics rather than by any customer's product calendar.

Unless Nintendo secures a replacement source or Macronix's expanded capacity arrives sooner than promised, physical Switch 2 cartridge supply is likely to tighten before it stabilizes — and the price of a boxed game may carry a small memory-market surcharge before long.