Photos shared by HKEPC on X show pallets of brand-new retail GeForce RTX 5090 cards being unpacked and slotted into multi-GPU AI servers. These aren't NVIDIA's workstation RTX PRO 6000 cards built for AI servers, but rather the same MSI and GIGABYTE RTX 5090 cards you'd find on Newegg under the "gaming graphics card" category, that is, if you could find them at anything resembling a reasonable price.
The cheapest RTX 5090 listings in the US have crossed $5,000, more than double the $1,999 launch price. European pricing has already cleared €5,200, and now we have a clearer picture of what's behind these skyrocketing prices.
Interestingly, the cards in these pictures aren't even the RTX 5090 D, the China-specific variant, which was deliberately nerfed for AI workloads at 2,375 AI TOPS compared to the standard model's 3,352, while keeping gaming performance largely intact.
Back in 2021, when miners swept up RTX 30-series cards, NVIDIA responded with Lite Hash Rate versions that cut mining performance while leaving gaming performance intact. The restriction was eventually bypassed, but it worked well enough for long enough to matter. This time, NVIDIA has not done the equivalent.
NVIDIA is no longer primarily a gaming company. The word "gaming" appears third in the metadata of NVIDIA's own homepage, behind AI and HPC. CEO Jensen Huang recently joined X and shared a letter from NVIDIA and 24 other companies urging US policymakers not to restrict open-weight AI.
Some elements of the HKEPC photos appear to have been edited or altered, so treat the images with some caution. We covered a Vietnamese system builder installing seven RTX 5090s into custom AI servers back in April 2025. While $5,000 prices might make it impossible for even premium rig builders to invest, it seems to work just fine for the ravenous AI scene, largely because the RTX 5090 is a bargain compared with an AI workstation GPU.
NVIDIA wants $16,000 for an RTX PRO 6000, and while that card packs 96GB of VRAM, many companies scrambling to build servers can make do with far less. Some companies might look to the newly debuted RTX PRO 5500 Blackwell workstation GPU with its GDDR7 memory, but it ultimately comes down to whether it can beat that $5,000 mark, which doesn't seem likely.
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That said, the RTX 5080 is not safe either. Plenty of AI deployments will happily make do with 16GB of VRAM, which effectively pushes the realistic ceiling for consumer GPU buyers down to the RTX 5070 Ti and below. You're still looking at over $1,000 for those on current market listings. The top end of consumer GPU gaming has been quietly cordoned off, and nothing on the horizon suggests that changes anytime soon.
