By Kyle Barr
Publication Date: 2026-01-28 22:00:00
Unless you long to witness the demise of accessible PC gaming, I wouldn’t check Amazon for any Nvidia graphics card right now. Just in the past month, prices on the company’s coveted GPUs have skyrocketed to obscene levels, and it may get worse as time goes on. If you’re looking for somebody to blame for the demise of your next dream PC, the buck might stop at Nvidia’s feet.
Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 5080 is selling for $500 or more over the base $1,000 launch price on sites like Newegg. The RTX 5090 pricing could best be described as a travesty. Some models are selling for close to $5,000. The card was supposed to settle at a $2,000 base price at launch. The ongoing RAM shortage, which has previously ballooned the price of consumer DRAM (dynamic random access memory) and PC storage units from SSDs to HDDs, has no sign of stopping any time soon.
AI data center projects created such a staggering demand for memory that the major semiconductor manufacturers have all refocused their businesses on supplying industry rather than consumer brands. Nvidia—the company that has gotten rich off selling the chip infrastructure for this buildout—last told us that while “memory supply is constrained,” it will “continue to ship all GeForce SKUs and is working closely with our suppliers to maximize memory availability.” That doesn’t mean much when the price of every GPU you actually wanted is going through the stratosphere.
