Nintendo's biggest ROM chip supplier is bowing out of the business

Judgment

Nintendo’s procurement and pricing leads now have to decide whether to absorb higher cartridge ROM costs from suppliers like Rohm and Lapis or pass them through as higher physical game prices, while digital already represents 61.5 percent of the business.

Basis

Macronix said in its third-quarter earnings report that ROM chip production has reached its end and that it will begin gradually decoupling from the game industry, as reported by BigGo Finance. Analyst David Gibson notes Macronix is Nintendo’s main memory chip maker for physical cartridges. The mechanism is wafer allocation: Macronix’s ROM production has shrunk 39 percent in the last year and now represents just 5 percent of its business, while capacity is stuck at 25,000 12-inch wafers a month and $1.2 billion in planned new capacity takes a year or more. Less profitable ROM chips are taking wafer space that could earn more from NOR, NAND, and eMMC. Nintendo said last month it had no plans to give up cartridges, but it may rely on Rohm and Lapis, and Gibson notes digital software sales represented 61.5 percent of Nintendo’s business in the second calendar quarter of 2026.