Anyone hoping to upgrade their PC may be in for a rough ride, as prices for Nvidia 5090 GPUs have skyrocketed. The RTX 50-series graphics cards have never been cheap, but even their sky-high retail pricing looks affordable compared to where they’re heading now amid the global RAM shortage. It’s a tough time for PC gaming, and it doesn’t look like things will let up anytime soon.
Nvidia unveiled the 50-series lineup early last year, and as one should expect of the fastest consumer GPU on the market, the most powerful of the bunch came with an eye-watering price tag. The RTX 5090 has an MSRP of $1,999, making this one component roughly the same price as two PlayStation 5 consoles. That’s a lot of money, but it does afford those who can buy one a whopping 32GB of DDR7 VRAM. Unfortunately, that memory is now facing a global supply constraint, so things are quickly getting even more expensive.
The RAM Shortage is About to Get Way Worse Because Micron is Ditching Consumers for AI
Micron is ending its popular Crucial brand of consumer PC products as the company turns its attention to AI amid an ongoing RAM price surge.
Retailers are Listing RTX 5090 GPUs for Over $3,000
As spotted by VideoCardz, the cheapest 5090 GPUs currently listed among Nvidia’s featured retailers are sitting around $2,500, roughly 25% above MSRP. However, many of these options are either out of stock or only available to pick up at a physical location. Most of the listings, especially those available for shipping, now start around the $3,000 mark, and some are closer to $4,000. The price surge comes on the heels of rumors that Nvidia may cut 50-series GPU production to preserve dwindling DDR7 supplies. Nvidia still hasn’t confirmed whether it’s actually implementing such a strategy, but fears over how the RAM shortage could impact availability have already caused retailers to raise prices in anticipation.
Nvidia is not the only company showing massive price increases amid the ongoing RAM crisis. The trend started in late 2025, when consumer-grade RAM kits tripled in price after SK Hynix and Samsung agreed to divert much of their memory production toward AI data centers. Things worsened when Micron dropped out of consumer RAM altogether, and as the laws of supply and demand took hold, things inevitably tightened for manufacturers. Now, companies like Nvidia, which do not typically operate their own semiconductor fabs but purchase components like RAM from outside suppliers, face supply bottlenecks and higher production costs, ultimately leading to higher end-user prices.
While it didn’t take long for prices to jump, it will most likely be a while before the market cools off. As more people rush to buy GPUs and other PC components, it will further restrict the available supply. On the production side, it will also take a long time for manufacturers to catch up with current demand, as they need to build new specialized facilities to create more RAM. Those barriers are why Micron estimates the RAM crisis will last beyond 2026, and if AI-driven demand rises even more, it could stretch things out further. Of course, it’s impossible to predict how exactly things will play out in the future, but things don’t look great for PC gamers at the moment.
Depending on how things proceed from here, PC gamers may not be alone in feeling the effects of the RAM shortage. It’s rumored that Sony and Xbox may delay their next-gen consoles to release them at a lower price point rather than having to ask more for them to account for higher production costs. Those rumors are unconfirmed for now, as is any response from Nvidia, but with the market looking as volatile as it is, nothing is necessarily off the table. For now, PC gaming is not very affordable, and may not be for some time.
Source: VideoCardz