Walk into a PC store in Berlin, Tokyo, and Chicago, and you'll see three completely different sets of graphics card logos on the shelf. What almost nobody realizes is how often those "different" brands are the exact same board, built in the exact same factory, sold under a name picked to suit the local market. This is the story of the handful of manufacturers — mostly based in Taiwan and Hong Kong — who actually build the world's Nvidia and AMD graphics cards, and the constellations of regional and sister brands they hide behind.

Galaxy / GALAX / KFA2 / Galakuro are, and always have been, the same company. Galaxy Microsystems was founded in Hong Kong in 1994 and built a reputation for overclocking-focused cards, especially its white-PCB "Hall of Fame" (HOF) line. For years it sold under the Galaxy name in Asia and Latin America and under KFA2 in Europe — same PCB, same cooler, same silicon, different sticker. In Japan specifically, the brand traded as Galakuro (グラクロ / Galaxy + Kuro, roughly "black galaxy"). In 2014 the company tried to simplify things by merging the Galaxy and KFA2 names worldwide into a single brand, GALAX — except in Europe, where "Galax" collided with Samsung's trademark on "Galaxy," so KFA2 stuck around there as a legal workaround rather than a genuine separate brand. None of this happened by accident. Back in 2008, Galaxy was quietly bought by Palit Microsystems, a much larger Taiwanese board-partner that most Western buyers have never heard of despite it being — by unit volume — one of the biggest graphics card manufacturers on Earth (it briefly overtook ASUS to become the world's largest AIB by volume in 2013). Palit's playbook is to run several outwardly independent-looking brands out of the same factories: - Palit — the mainstream/budget-to-midrange face, strongest in Asia-Pacific and emerging markets. - Gainward — a historically premium, design-forward brand (Palit bought it in 2005) that's stronger in Europe. - GALAX / KFA2 / Galakuro — the overclocking/enthusiast face described above. - XpertVision, Daytona, Yuan — smaller or more regional labels for lower-tier or specialty products (Yuan leans toward video-capture hardware). Palit and Gainward have on occasion released literally the same card — same PCB, same clocks — under both names simultaneously (their small-form-factor RTX 40-series cards being one recent example), just with different box art and branding, aimed at buyers who have brand loyalty to one name or the other. A 2026 twist: in late April 2026, GALAX shut down as an independent operating brand entirely — its global team was laid off, and Palit absorbed the brand name, warranty obligations, and remaining inventory directly. Palit cited raw-material and allocation pressure from the AI boom squeezing supply for smaller "boutique" brands. Industry watchers now expect Gainward could eventually see similar consolidation, since it's a smaller, more redundant line sitting inside the same parent. It's a useful reminder that these brand trees aren't static — they get pruned when the underlying economics change. The other major cluster runs through PC Partner Group, a Hong Kong-founded manufacturer (now headquartered in Singapore) that owns: - ZOTAC — its flagship consumer brand, strong worldwide, especially known for compact/SFF cards and mini-PCs. - Inno3D — a separate consumer brand, popular particularly in parts of Europe and Asia. - Manli — a smaller, budget-oriented brand. Unlike the Galaxy/KFA2 situation, these three aren't exact regional aliases of one product line — they're genuinely separate brand identities and product designs, just owned and manufactured by the same parent company. PC Partner also historically manufactured reference-design Radeon cards for AMD itself. One persistent internet myth worth killing: Sapphire is not part of this family. Because Sapphire (the top AMD-focused AIB) and ZOTAC (mostly Nvidia-focused) are so often mentioned in the same breath as "the big non-Asus/MSI names," people frequently assume they're siblings. They aren't — Sapphire is independently owned. In late 2024, PC Partner relocated its corporate registration from Hong Kong to Singapore (forming PC Partner Singapore PTE Ltd) and reportedly began shifting production toward Indonesia, explicitly to reduce its exposure to U.S. semiconductor export restrictions on China-based manufacturing ahead of the RTX 50-series launch — a good example of how geopolitics now shapes even a company's registered address, not just its branding. On the AMD/Radeon side, the equivalent structure is TUL Corporation, a Taiwanese company that owns: - PowerColor — its main, globally recognized Radeon brand. - VTX3D — a budget-focused sister brand that targeted European and some Asian markets, using PowerColor's own engineering and manufacturing. VTX3D was discontinued in 2016 as the discrete-GPU market contracted, with PowerColor absorbing its remaining warranty/RMA obligations — the same "phase out the smaller sibling, fold support into the flagship" pattern GALAX would go through a decade later under Palit. A handful of underlying motives keep showing up across all these cases: - Trademark collisions across regions (Galax vs. Samsung's "Galaxy" in Europe) force a single company to keep multiple names alive even when it would rather not. - Acquired heritage brands retain value. When Palit bought Galaxy and Gainward, or TUL built out PowerColor, keeping the acquired name alive preserves brand loyalty and shelf recognition that would be expensive to rebuild. - Market segmentation. Running a "premium/enthusiast" brand (GALAX HOF, Gainward Phoenix) alongside a "value" brand (Palit, Manli) off the same factory line lets one manufacturer credibly compete at every price point without cannibalizing its own flagship's image. - Geopolitics and supply constraints increasingly decide which brands survive. Export controls pushed PC Partner to re-domicile in Singapore; AI-driven memory and chip shortages were the stated reason Palit folded GALAX into itself in 2026. Palit Microsystems (Taiwan) Palit → Gainward → GALAX (formerly independent Galaxy Microsystems; absorbed April 2026) → KFA2 (Europe) → Galakuro (Japan) → plus XpertVision, Daytona, Yuan PC Partner Group (Singapore, formerly Hong Kong) ZOTAC → Inno3D → Manli (Sapphire is a common false addition to this list — it's a separate, independent company.) TUL Corporation (Taiwan) PowerColor → VTX3D (discontinued 2016) Compare that to the brands people usually assume are the "real" independent players — ASUS, MSI, Gigabyte, Sapphire, EVGA (which exited the GPU business entirely in 2022), XFX (owned by Pine Technology) — and you start to see that the graphics card aisle has always had far fewer actual manufacturers behind it than the logo count suggests.