AI Firms Bulk-Buy Retail RTX 5090 Cards, Lifting Prices Above 5000 Dollars

Publicly circulated photographs show that multiple artificial intelligence companies are buying NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 graphics cards in large volumes for building artificial intelligence servers. In the images, batches of new boxed RTX 5090 cards are being unpacked together at an AI server assembly site. These cards are not NVIDIA's RTX PRO 6000 workstation products for professional users, nor are they data-center accelerator cards; they are standard retail GeForce RTX 5090 units sold to ordinary consumers. They are installed directly into multi-GPU artificial intelligence computing systems.

After large-scale purchasing by AI companies, RTX 5090 prices in some retail channels have exceeded 5000 dollars, more than double the official launch price. During the earlier cryptocurrency mining boom, large numbers of mining farm operators bought GeForce cards in bulk, leaving gamers facing shortages. NVIDIA later introduced Lite Hash Rate (LHR) versions, which limited mining performance to make the cards less attractive to miners while keeping gaming performance unaffected; the restriction was fully bypassed about a year later.

The products seen in the photographs are not the RTX 5090D or later V2 versions adjusted for specific markets, but the standard RTX 5090. Previously, to meet certain export restriction requirements, NVIDIA reduced the artificial intelligence computing capability of the RTX 5090D while largely maintaining its gaming performance. Similar restrictions have so far not been applied to the standard RTX 5090 sold globally. As more artificial intelligence companies treat high-end consumer graphics cards as part of their server hardware, the RTX 5090 is being used in artificial intelligence infrastructure.