As new photos from the HKEPC source show, batches of GeForce RTX 5090 video cards in their original packaging are unpacked not in gamers’ apartments, but at server assembly sites for artificial intelligence.
At the same time, companies involved in AI infrastructure do not use specialized RTX PRO 6000 accelerators or specialized Nvidia data center solutions, but ordinary consumer cards that are intended for retail sale to gamers.
The photos show exactly the standard versions of the RTX 5090, exactly the same ones that ordinary buyers have been unable to find in stores for months at a recommended price. These cards are taken straight out of the boxes and installed in multiprocessor systems designed to train and run artificial intelligence models.
A similar situation already happened during the cryptocurrency boom, when miners bought Nvidia gaming cards en masse, leaving gamers without access to new devices. Nvidia then responded by releasing Lite Hash Rate versions, which artificially reduced mining performance without affecting gaming performance.
However, after about a year, enthusiasts completely bypassed this restriction, and the cards again became attractive for cryptocurrency mining. True, the boom had already faded away.
Now history is repeating itself, but instead of mining, demand is created by artificial intelligence tasks. The bottom line for everyday buyers looks familiar – the retail price of the RTX 5090 on select sites has reportedly exceeded the $5,000 mark, which is more than double the card’s starting price of $1,999 at the time of release.
It is especially significant that the photos do not include versions of the RTX 5090D or v2, special SKUs for the Chinese market, which Nvidia has already reduced in performance in AI tasks to comply with US export restrictions.
Forget the RTX 5090 – a top-end PC from 1996 would cost $12,000 today in today’s money
This means that technically the company is perfectly capable of limiting the performance of gaming cards specifically in AI loads, while maintaining full gaming characteristics.
However, such restrictions were never applied to the standard version of the RTX 5090, which is sold worldwide. Considering how central artificial intelligence is to Nvidia’s business right now, the likelihood that the company will decide to intervene in the interests of gamers seems extremely low.
