NVIDIA warns stock shortages may happen with RTX 5090 and 5080 GPUs, as rumor mill has claimed

NVIDIA, or specifically, one of its staff members, has confirmed what the rumor mill has been saying for some time now - that stock of Blackwell GPUs might be thin on the ground with the initial launch of the RTX 5090 and 5080 graphics cards on January 30.

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This comes from a post made by Tim, a moderator on NVIDIA's official GeForce Graphics Cards forum, who tells us the following:

"We expect significant demand for the GeForce RTX 5090 and 5080 and believe stock-outs may happen. NVIDIA & our partners are shipping more stock to retail every day to help get GPUs into the hands of gamers."

• Read more: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090, RTX 5080 sales restrictions rumor: no businesses, just PC gamers
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So, there you have it - expect the GPUs to run out of stock, because NVIDIA is anticipating just that, based on the likely levels of demand, and the inventory shipped thus far to retailers.

As we've heard on the rumor mill, the flagship RTX 5090 is looking particularly weak for stock, and some retailers are complaining about having hardly any units for launch week.

Expect the usual circus of refreshing store pages and trying to grab the graphics card you want, probable failure, and then the salt in the wound of seeing that GPU go up on an auction site later in the day at a wallet-quaking price. Grrr...

Might the RTX 5070 models fare any better? Well, we're not confident about that either, but NVIDIA is rumored to be pushing back the launch of these mid-range GPUs until later in February - not that we have any confirmation the schedule was ever early in the month. But if there's anything to that gossip, it's happening presumably to give some breathing room to build up more stock.

That'll be needed, though, considering the RTX 5070 in particular is likely to be in much heavier demand than the pricier Blackwell graphics cards, considering this model is the only one in (relatively) affordable territory.