RTX 5090 scalped for up to $5000 on Chinese black markets, goes for up to $10K on eBay

Remember the crypto-mining insanity, where trying to buy graphics cards was nigh impossible? Well, NVIDIA's new GeForce RTX 5090 is being sold on Chinese black markets for $5000... with some listings on eBay seeing the RTX 5090 selling for between $5000 and an out-of-this-world $10,000... yeah, $10K for the RTX 5090.

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The Information reports: "DeepSeek's skyrocketing popularity has boosted demand for NVIDIA's gaming chips in the underground market as tech firms realize they can run DeepSeek's models at a fraction of the price of AI chips, according to five chip smugglers".

It looks like Chinese companies have discovered that it's far cheaper running DeepSeek AI models on NVIDIA's consumer-focused GeForce RTX series GPUs rather than more expensive -- and hard, or impossible to get because of US export restrictions -- like the H20, H100, etc. China only has access to "stripped-down" variants of its GPUs like the GeForce RTX 5090D, and that demand is so strong that these models are now being sold at "black market" prices with the RTX 5090 (non-D) selling for up to $5000 or more.

• Read more: DeepSeek is rumored to be working on in-house AI chips, would compete with NVIDIA

Even with missing ROPs, the new NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50 series GPUs are still in insane demand, with the higher-end RTX 5090 being a fantastic choice for AI developers, especially with its huge 32GB of ultra-fast GDDR7 memory. The RTX 5090 features 32GB GDDR7 memory, 3352 AI TOPs of performance, and 5th Gen Tensor Cores... perfect if you want an AI GPU but don't want to spend thousands more on a professional-grade card like the H20.