NVIDIA is reportedly planning to raise prices on the RTX 5090, its flagship consumer GPU, with the broader RTX 50 series and PRO lineup potentially getting the same treatment. The culprit is GDDR7 memory - the high-bandwidth RAM soldered onto the card that makes it fast enough to run large AI models locally. GDDR7 costs have been climbing, and NVIDIA appears to be preparing to pass that along.
The RTX 5090 already launched at $1,999 - up from the RTX 4090's $1,599 launch price in 2022. A further increase would sting hardest for people running LLMs (large language models) locally on their own hardware, which has become one of the main reasons the local AI community has been gravitating toward high-end consumer cards in the first place. The 5090's 32GB of GDDR7 VRAM (the memory on the GPU itself, separate from your system RAM) is currently the ceiling for consumer hardware - enough to run 70-billion-parameter models that produce quality comparable to GPT-3.5 without paying per-query cloud fees.
No official announcement from NVIDIA yet, so treat this as a report rather than a confirmed change. That said, if you were already planning to buy and the 5090 was on your list, the window between a rumored hike and an actual one tends to be short. For most users who don't need the top-of-the-line card, the RTX 5080 at $999 hits a better price-to-VRAM ratio for local AI work at 16GB - assuming its price holds.