NVIDIA RTX 5080 Price Surges Over 30% in Two Weeks; 24GB Variant Delayed
AI-driven demand squeezes production capacity, causing high-end gaming GPU prices to spike and delaying the launch of the new 24GB VRAM RTX 5080 due to missing design docs and chip stock depletion.
According to German tech outlet heise online, the price of NVIDIA's second-fastest high-end gaming graphics card, the RTX 5080, has risen by more than 30 percent in the last two weeks, making it difficult to find below 2,000 euros. This surge was partly fueled by earlier rumors that the flagship RTX 5090 might be discontinued. Although NVIDIA Vice President Jeff Fisher later denied these claims, market anxiety had already driven up demand for the secondary product. Meanwhile, the price of the RTX 5090 itself has climbed to around 8,000 euros.
More critically, the planned 24GB VRAM version of the RTX 5080, intended as a potential alternative or supplement to the RTX 5090, appears to be delayed. According to Taiwan-based hardware news site Benchlife, graphics card manufacturers have not yet received the complete design documents from NVIDIA for this new version, which were originally scheduled for October. Additionally, existing stocks of the GB203 GPU chips at manufacturing bases in China are sold out, with only enough supply to last one to two months. This casts significant doubt on the original plan to launch the new RTX 5080 during the CES exhibition in January 2027.
The root cause of this shortage is the ongoing artificial intelligence boom. NVIDIA uses the same GPU chips for its workstation graphics cards (such as the RTX Pro series), which feature larger memory capacities suitable for running local AI models and offer higher profit margins. For instance, the GB202 chip is used in both the RTX 5090 and professional cards like the RTX Pro 6000. With GDDR7 memory also in short supply, NVIDIA prioritizes the higher-margin professional workstation market, thereby squeezing the production capacity and pricing space for consumer gaming graphics cards.