The flagship NVIDIA graphics card will cost buyers in the United States more than $5,000, and in Europe prices can be even higher. The “recommended” price is significantly lower, reminiscent of VideoCardz: at launch the top card was priced at $2,000. The reality turned out to be very different, and Chinese reviewers from HKEPC showed photos that clarify the issue of such a high price.

The photo’s author was at a facility that assembles servers for artificial intelligence systems. The images show massive pallets of retail boxes of NVIDIA RTX 5090 graphics cards, which are unpacked and installed into these highly demanded AI servers.

These are the “regular” cards intended for sale in offline and online stores, not the RTX PRO 6000, which is aimed at specialized equipment and applications.

NVIDIA is aware of the history, so the company “trimmed” the performance of a particular version of the RTX 5090 to make it less attractive for the AI market while preserving gaming performance. However, this approach apparently does not affect Chinese AI server manufacturers. NVIDIA also closely monitors large‑scale graphics‑card purchases, but according to VideoCardz, this also seems to have no effect on Chinese “wholesale” buyers.