Nvidia sells hard-to-get RTX GPUs from a ‘food truck’

Buying goodies from a trendy food truck can get expensive. But I’ll bet that even the most desperate TikTok foodie hasn’t dropped more than a grand at once on something they can’t actually eat. But you can if you’re attending Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference (GTC), where the company is selling its RTX 5080 and 5090 graphics cards from a pop-up “food truck” sales stall.

Don’t everybody rush to San Jose at once. The impossible-to-find cards will only be sold to GTC attendees—apparently alongside merch shirts and puffy vests—who are already paying more than a thousand dollars for the cheapest ticket to see the newest industrial hardware from Nvidia and its partners. And no, those passes don’t get you any discounts on the cards, some of which are from AIB partners and not the Founder’s Edition GPUs that are going for nearly mythical retail prices.

Even Nvidia only has a couple thousand cards on hand—1,000 each for the RTX 5080 and 5090, according to Tom’s Hardware. They’re being sold in small batches at random times. One Twitter/X post from yesterday says that the store will sell 90 of them for the next 30 minutes.

GTC continues today and tomorrow, showing off mostly AI and industrial products, including some new Nvidia-branded desktops and mini PCs. The people who actually buy these cards will be mostly developers or otherwise poised to use them for something other than PC gaming. That said, it wouldn’t be all that surprising if some of the cards sold at the show pop up on eBay or Craigslist right afterward. After all, flipping a hot item might just cover a first-class ticket home.