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
Stupid people. Loading the internet with AI Shittttt.
Tensor parallelism works fine across pcie for inference, bad for training, fine for inference.
kinda moot image is doctored or generated.
there's plenty of MCs that have stock. It's just the super dense areas that are sold out.
I 100% believe these photos could have been real prior to being scrambled by whatever state sponsored phone brand with its own half-baked proprietary AI filter boiled them to hell and back.
U want to make us even more angry or what?
It is what it is, and its bad for us all, prices went throught the roof.
At least gaming insdustry need to optimize their games and make them
run good on older hardware that most people have right now.
Or good luck with selling their games :D
This picture might be AI slop, but its real.
Then again this may be real regardless of the AI slop pics, when gamers are priced out of buying cards it's no surprise AI companies would have them.
I'm not sure why news sites are doing this besides a slow news cycle since everything these days is AI and more AI, I don't see this getting any better either as tech sites use AI to write articles or replaces their writers with AI.
Yes, its supposed to infuriate you so you click and generate ad revenue.
Doesn't even have to be true, as it so seems.
I just ordered two Nvidia SOROs.'Reportedly' 'Apparently', 'Allegedly'... there is so much language that really just says nothing other than being a disclaimer for obvious bullshit :)Pay for a news paper with actual journalists behind it. Its the only antidote. Everything else is just pulling wool over your eyes. I know, I know, there are lots of people spitting on MSM, but really... its all you've really got and it always defeats the 'new media' in quality, persistence, and actually exposing things worth talking about.
like this one...Perhaps TPU needs to add a way to ... "downvote" articles so they can get an idea how many of these kinds of posts are diluting the site's worth