We study the effect of nuclear matter in ϒ production in d Au collisions at RHIC and p Pb collisions at the LHC. We find that the nuclear modification factor, , measured at RHIC is not satisfactorily reproduced by the conventional effects used in the literature, namely the modification of the gluon distribution in bound nucleons and an—effective—survival probability for a bound state to escape the nucleus. In particular, we argue that this probability should be close to 1 as opposed to the J / ψ case. We note that, at backward rapidities, the unexpected suppression of observed by PHENIX hints at the presence of a gluon EMC effect, analogous to the quark EMC effect—but likely stronger. Further nuclear matter effects, such as saturation and fractional energy loss, are discussed, but none of them fit in a more global picture of quarkonium production. Predictions for ϒ ( nS ) for the forthcoming p Pb run at 5 TeV at the LHC are also presented.