Sunday, September 13th 2026
AI Firms Are Reportedly Buying NVIDIA RTX 5090 GPUs in Bulk for Server Use
New photos shared by HKEPC allegedly show pallets of brand-new, boxed GeForce RTX 5090 cards being unpacked at AI server assembly sites. Notably, these firms are not using the RTX PRO 6000 or dedicated data center accelerators NVIDIA actually markets for that work. The cards in question are standard retail RTX 5090s, the same cards gamers have struggled to find at anywhere close to MSRP, being pulled straight from their packaging and slotted into multi-GPU AI rigs. It must be mentioned that some elements of these photos appear to be altered, or at least edited with AI, so take these with a bit of caution.
Despite that, the current situation is not entirely new. During the crypto boom, miners bought up GeForce cards in bulk while gamers got squeezed out, and NVIDIA eventually responded with Lite Hash Rate models that throttled mining performance without touching gaming specs. That restriction got fully bypassed within about a year. This time, the workload is AI instead of mining, but the outcome for gamers looks familiar. As a result, retail RTX 5090 pricing has reportedly climbed past $5,000 on some listings, more than double its $1,999 launch price. Industry analysts even warned about this possibility months ago, and we now have a good idea why the RTX 5090 is at the price it's at.
Notably, the cards in these shared photos aren't even RTX 5090D or v2 variants, the China-specific SKUs NVIDIA already nerfed for AI workloads to comply with export rules. That means NVIDIA has already proven it knows how to limit a GeForce card's AI performance while keeping gaming performance intact, yet hasn't applied that same restriction to the standard RTX 5090 sold everywhere else. Given how central AI has become to NVIDIA's business, it seems unlikely the company will step in this time either.
Sources:
HKEPC on X, Reddit, via Videocardz
Despite that, the current situation is not entirely new. During the crypto boom, miners bought up GeForce cards in bulk while gamers got squeezed out, and NVIDIA eventually responded with Lite Hash Rate models that throttled mining performance without touching gaming specs. That restriction got fully bypassed within about a year. This time, the workload is AI instead of mining, but the outcome for gamers looks familiar. As a result, retail RTX 5090 pricing has reportedly climbed past $5,000 on some listings, more than double its $1,999 launch price. Industry analysts even warned about this possibility months ago, and we now have a good idea why the RTX 5090 is at the price it's at.
112 Comments on AI Firms Are Reportedly Buying NVIDIA RTX 5090 GPUs in Bulk for Server Use
Otherwise it is just 32GB of VRAM, and the 'AI firm' will get many timeouts trying to run anything beyond 30b ...
Now the question is, why?
It's the crypto scam all over again, except the bubble is much bigger this time.
Edit: Or maybe not. Looking at GPU prices is SORO-ful enough. :laugh:
The first and last pictures look more real, though.
However, the more hw the final stages of AI bubble spends on, the bigger the crash and the bigger the discounts at the end. Bring it on!
There is also the reflection of a stack of boxes on the floor has some inaccuracies.