Alas, my series ‘I’d do anything for an Nvidia RTX 5090 at MSRP, but I won’t do that’ has been cancelled after one episode, on account of the fact the card has seemingly disappeared from most major US retailers.
What remains are online listings from third-party sellers, often asking for a price even higher above MSRP, as spotted by Tom’s Hardware. Previously, it’s been cheaper for me to hop on an international flight to PAX West or QuakeCon, and pick up an RTX 5090 at the event for the $1,999/£1,939 MSRP than buy it anywhere else. This will come as no surprise for those who have been keeping track of our graphics card price watch, where we’ve seen the RTX 5090 go up 83% in price and even breach the $6,000 sound barrier.
What our Dave most recently recommended as the cheapest option, this Gigabyte Windforce RTX 5090 from Newegg was $5,700 just last Thursday. Now it’s a frankly offensive $9050 from a third-party reseller. The same card is sold out on Amazon and Best Buy. But the cheapest new RTX 5090 I’ve been able to find is the Asus TUF, again from a reseller, for $6,800.
Don’t even get me started on how things are looking in the UK—though, for those curious, Dave’s tireless efforts did find the Zotac RTX 5090 going for £3,940 from Scan. That’s still too rich for my cup of tea.
So, where is all the stock going? Well, some deep-pocketed consumers are definitely snapping up at least a few cards. Recent research suggests a trend that ‘defies common wisdom’, with folks buying more high-end graphics cards despite rising prices, to the tune of 12.5 million shipped last quarter alone.
Nvidia still enjoys a 90% share of the market according to that same report from John Peddie research. But given company CEO Jensen Huang recently shared that 100,000 Nvidia GPUs were used to train OpenAI’s latest model, GPT-6 Astra—not to mention there’s already plans to bring quadruple that amount of hardware online—I’ll give you three guesses why there are so few RTX 5090s available for consumers.
It’s likely not RTX 5090 cards being used specifically to train Astra, but it’s still possible that other AI firms are buying up the high-ends cards to adorn their server PCs in lieu of datacenter accelerators or RTX Pro 6000 GPUs. RTX 5090 pallet images shared by HKEPC imply as much (via VideoCardz).
Okay, I’ll also give you this for free: Nvidia may not be producing fewer 4nm GB20x Blackwell chips on the whole, but may simply be shifting more of that stock towards its professional products—like workstations—instead. That’s still going to leave fewer gaming GPUs to go around, and we’re back where we started with runaway RTX 5090 prices.