NVIDIA is reportedly preparing an RTX 5090 price hike due to rising costs of GDDR7 memory

The global memory crisis is in full swing and showing no signs of letting up. DRAM prices are absolutely through the roof, and that is directly affecting consumer products such as RAM and graphics cards. Now, it looks like NVIDIA is planning to raise the price of the flagship RTX 5090 due to rising GDDR7 memory costs.

According to Chinese Board Channels, NVIDIA is reportedly preparing to increase prices for its GeForce RTX 5090 and China-exclusive RTX 5090D V2 GPUs. NVIDIA has informed its add-in board partners (AIBs) of a price increase for these two GPUs, citing rising GDDR7 VRAM costs. Per the report, NVIDIA has not specified a new retail price for these graphics cards, but this change will result in a $300 (nearly 2000 RMB) price increase for the AIBs.

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NVIDIA provides a GPU kit to its board partners that includes the GPU die (GB202 in this case) and GDDR7 memory. The add-in board partners then build the rest of the board around this configuration, therefore avoiding supply chain delays. However, it now seems NVIDIA is planning to pass on its increased costs to board partners, which in turn will be passed on to consumers.

This is not the first move NVIDIA has made to weave through the DRAM crisis. The company is reportedly bringing back the RTX 3060 12GB in July, while the RTX 5050 9GB has been put on the back burner. Major board partner ASUS also recently reallocated its GPU supply, prioritizing the high-margin RTX 5080 over the 5070 Ti since both cards have 16GB of GDDR7 VRAM. This decision was also made with the current "RAMpocalypse" in mind, as ASUS would rather favor the graphics card that generates higher profits.

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Interestingly, NVIDIA's flagship RTX 5090 still has its MSRP listed as $1,999 on NVIDIA's website, but of course, it is never found at that price. The current market price of the RTX 5090 hovers between $3,500 and $4,500 on online retailers, but the supply is so limited that it's hard to get an accurate sense of price patterns. With this new price increase, we might see RTX 5090s regularly cross the $5,000 threshold on online retail sites like Newegg.

Currently, there are no reports of other Blackwell RTX 5000-series GPUs receiving a price increase. But since NVIDIA didn't even spare the 24GB RTX 5090D V2 model, I get a sense that more price hikes might be coming our way soon. It will also be interesting to see how the next generation of NVIDIA GeForce GPUs is affected by the crippling memory shortage.