Nvidia begins warning that GeForce 5080, 5090 may sell out

You knew it was going to happen: Nvidia executives are already floating the possibility that Nvidia’s new high-end RTX 5000 cards may sell out.

Tim Adams, Nvidia’s global head of the GeForce community, said in a forum post that Nvidia believes that “stock outs” — a situation where retailers sell out of a certain product — may happen.

“We expect significant demand for the GeForce RTX 5090 and 5080 and believe stock-outs may happen,” he wrote in an Nvidia forum post. “Nvidia & our partners are shipping more stock to retail every day to help get GPUs into the hands of gamers.”

On January 6, Nvidia unveiled the GeForce 5000 family of PC GPUs, including the 5090, 5080, 5070 Ti, and 5070. Surprisingly, Nvidia announced that the cards would sell for less than some expected, though the RTX 5090 is priced at a whopping $1,999 and the RTX 5080 will sell for $999. Our first review of the GeForce RTX 5090 is out — and while this “brutally fast” PC graphics card may be revolutionary, the price is still eye-popping.

So how does Nvidia expect that the most expensive GeForce RTX 5000 cards in its Blackwell lineup will sell out, but the cheaper ones won’t? Well, for one thing, Adams doesn’t address cards like the 5070 specifically. But our review also leads with a very specific test — AI — rather than a gaming benchmark. With all sorts of companies dedicating eye-popping sums of money toward AI LLM training and inferencing, you should expect businesses will be doing anything they can to get their hands on the fastest cards they can obtain — and with corporate R&D budgets backing them, and not a gamer’s paycheck.

For now, the only things you can do are to camp the online retailers who will be selling 5090 cards, or literally camp the brick-and-mortar retailers who will be selling them. As in, get in line. Like, right now.