RTX 5090s are going for as much as $9000, as AI server builders reportedly buy Nvidia's flagship by the pallet, but the photos behind the story may be AI-generated
AI firms are reportedly buying RTX 5090s by the pallet, which Nvidia's own driver license has prohibited since 2017
by https://www.techradar.com/author/rahim-amir · TechRadarNews By Rahim Amir Published 17 September 2026
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- The cheapest available US RTX 5090 now costs over $6000 against a $1,999 launch price, with third-party listings often running past $9,000
- The GPU that already pushed past $3,500 in Feb 2026 owing to memory constraints driving prices higher has now hit fresh highs at multiple retailers
- The move is linked to AI demand, as data center operators have entered the fray to secure compute despite Nvidia's GeForce driver license having banned 'data center deployment' on paper since 2017
Six weeks ago, the story was ultra-rare books being fed spine-first into high-speed scanners so that AI labs could train on text written before chatbots polluted the corpus.
Focus, however, has shifted considerably to AI labs bringing the same voracious appetite to Nvidia's flagship consumer-grade Blackwell GPU, the RTX 5090, which has essentially disappeared from shelves unless you want to pay a 200 percent or higher premium to grab one.
Photographs circulated by Hong Kong outlet HKEPC, and picked up by multiple publications including Guru3D, VideoCardz, and TechPowerUp, appear to show wooden pallets stacked with boxed, retail GeForce RTX 5090 cards at AI server assembly sites, waiting to be unpacked and slotted into multi-GPU rigs.
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The sky is the limit for Nvidia's flagship consumer card?
This isn't the first time Nvidia's RTX 5090 GPUs have been deployed en masse on multi-GPU, AI-centric rigs, but this time feels different, even compared with previous shortages.
For context, Nvidia launched the RTX 5090 at $1,999 in January 2025. Tom's Hardware's price tracker, updated on September 14 2026, lists the cheapest available US card at $6,389, nearly 3.2x the former.
PCGamesN reported the same week that first-party stock at Amazon, Newegg, and Best Buy had essentially vanished, leaving third-party marketplace listings above $6,000 and, in some places, over $9,000.
The pictures in circulation don't show RTX PRO workstation GPUs, but rather GPUs from MSI, Gigabyte, and ASUS that the average gaming enthusiast or consumer would pick off a shelf.
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