Macronix, the Taiwanese chipmaker that has supplied the read-only memory inside Nintendo's game cartridges for generations, is walking away from the business — not because cartridges stopped selling, but because data centres pay better.
Chairman and chief executive Miin Wu confirmed on the company's Q3 2026 earnings call that Macronix will gradually phase out ROM production and point its capacity at NOR flash for servers. The quarter made the case for him. ROM revenue fell 39 per cent year on year, while NOR revenue rose 158 per cent and NAND rose 768 per cent. ROM, which was 26 per cent of Macronix's sales in the second quarter of 2025, was 5 per cent in Q3 2026 — the last quarter the company will report it as a separate line. Profit topped NT$10 billion in a quarter for the first time.
"Demand for NOR used in data centers is very robust," Wu said, according to the Taipei Times. "Customers are chasing us for more capacity, demanding that we deliver more NOR flash solutions for data centers." He added that he expects chip price increases to persist.
For Nintendo the timing is awkward. It is the last of the big three console makers still committed to physical media: in August it said physical titles accounted for 38.5 per cent of its game sales and that it has "no plans" to abandon them, while Sony has said it will stop producing physical discs from January 2028. Switch 2 pricing has already been buffeted by the wider memory shortage, and the cartridges themselves are custom ROM — a low-margin, low-growth product line in a year when every wafer of memory capacity has somewhere more profitable to go.
This is not an isolated exit. Micron shut down Crucial, its consumer RAM and SSD brand, to chase AI data-centre demand. Memory makers are reallocating capacity toward accelerators and servers at a pace that is now visible in consumer hardware: console prices, cartridge availability, the cost of the RAM in a desktop. The AI buildout is not merely competing with gamers for chips. It is competing with them for the factories that make the parts, and the parts are leaving first.
Two questions follow. The first is substitution: Nintendo has other ROM suppliers, and no announcement has been made about cartridge supply. The second is price. Macronix has told customers to expect continuing increases, and a phase-out removes capacity from a market with no obvious new entrant. Physical games survived digital storefronts, collectors and bandwidth caps; whether they survive a memory boom is now a supply-chain question rather than a cultural one.
