NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has weighed in on NVIDIA's new GeForce RTX 50 series GPUs, going as far as saying that the RTX 5080 with its 16GB of GDDR7 is a "monopolistic crime against consumers" for $1000+ in 2025.
In a post on X, the NSA whistleblower said: "Endless next-quarter thinking has reduced the NVIDIA brand to"F-tier value for S-tier prices". 5070 should have had 16GB VRAM minimum, 5080 w 24/32 SKUs, 5090 32/48/+. Releasing a $1,000+ GPU in 2025 with a crippling 16GB is a monopolistic crime against the consumer".
Snowden seems pretty angry about NVIDIA's new GeForce RTX 50 series GPUs, but he's not wrong... the GeForce RTX 5080 launching with just 16GB of VRAM in 2025 is disappointing to say the least, and he's right to say that it should be offered with 24GB or 32GB options.
NVIDIA's new flagship ultra-enthusiast GeForce RTX 5090 has 32GB of GDDR7 memory, but that's not enough to impress the NSA whistleblower, because he thinks that SKU should have 32GB, 48GB, and higher (64GB) offerings. That would be awesome to see, but if he thinks that they're committing monopolistic crimes now, imagine the pricing that NVIDIA would have on the RTX 5080 if it had 24GB or 32GB, let alone what the RTX 5090 would cost if it had 32GB, 48GB, or an eye-watering 64GB of GDDR7.
I think we'll have to wait for NVIDIA's refreshed GeForce RTX 50 SUPER graphics cards in the future, where it would be nice to see NVIDIA unleash the RTX 5080 SUPER with 24GB or 32GB of faster GDDR7 memory, and a monster new RTX 5090 SUPER with 48GB or 64GB of GDDR7 would be real, real nice to see. Snowden might be happy then.