We have an interesting new rumor about how many Switch 2 consoles Nintendo has secured for the US.
This story received a sudden level of urgency when we learned that video game consoles would receive tariffs as high as 145 %. This was based on the knowledge that the US government declared high tariffs against China, that most manufacturing of video game consoles were in China, and that consoles were not added to the list of exemptions.
This information could still be changing to this day, because there’s a level of uncertainty with how the US is implementing their tariffs, but as we found out, Nintendo made preparations well in advance. As it turns out, they prepared to make Switch 2 consoles in Vietnam in large capacities. While Nintendo won’t disclose these details, thanks to datamining and some insiders speaking out, we now know that Nintendo and other tech companies planned for the day US and China trade would go south again, and Nintendo seems more prepared than we expected.
As for numbers, we got a big one from Nintendo that reveals the scale of demand. No less than Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa revealed that they had 2.2 million MyNintendo users applying for the Switch 2 lottery in Japan.
Subsequently, we saw multiple estimates from analysts. There may be pre-orders for 6 to 8 million units overall, but the actual demand could be as high as 9 million units, or even higher than that.
And that takes us to today. As Necro Felipe posted on Bluesky, LiC and MarcoP90 believe that Nintendo has shipped 1.2 million Switch 2 units to the US as of March 2025. Of course, all these units were made from Vietnam, for the purpose of avoiding the steep tariffs for Chinese products as much as possible.
Necro Felipe also pointed out that Nintendo of America serves as a hub to distribute their products to Canada, Mexico, Brazil, and other countries across the Americas. So it’s possible that not all of these units are meant for the US. But even then, there’s reason to believe that Nintendo isn’t quite ready to distribute around the world quite yet.
For example, for South East Asia, the Switch 2 doesn’t have a pre-order date, and availability is projected for sometime between July to September 2025. This implies that Nintendo is prioritizing their biggest markets, and in that hierarchy, Japan and the US would be at the top, followed by MENA, which includes Europe, and then the rest.
It looks like even Nintendo’s best preparations were not enough to meet the actual demand for the console around the world. As much as we’ve referred to it as the kind of problem you want to have, we’re hopeful that Nintendo will have far more consoles made and shipped by the time June arrives.
