Chinese resellers are seeing price hikes for Nvidia’s RTX 5090 series of graphics processing units (GPUs), as artificial intelligence (AI) companies rush to stockpile the consumer-grade cards as possible alternatives for the US firm’s banned H20 chip.
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Prices for the RTX 5090 series have been on the rise over the past month, as Chinese AI companies see them as an H20 replacement, according to interviews with three third-party Nvidia resellers in China.
The development shows how desperate some firms are to secure AI chips, as domestic supply cannot meet demand amid the computing investment frenzy.
Launched in January, the RTX 5090 uses 5-nanometre technology and was targeted at video gamers and content creators, offering the ability to tackle “the most advanced models … with unprecedented AI horsepower”, according to the company. Still, it is not regarded as an ideal alternative for the H20, which is specifically designed for data centres.
The RTX 5090D GPU, which has slightly lower AI processing power than the RTX 5090 to meet US export restrictions to China, has been especially popular in the country, with prices rising more than 10 per cent in the past month, said Zhou Da, a computer component retailer for Asus in Shanghai.
Another Guangdong-based merchant, who sells graphics cards made by Nvidia’s major Chinese hardware partners including AsusTek Computer and Micro-Star International, said prices are “fluctuating every day because of market and policy changes”, but added that the overall trend for the top-spec gaming card was higher prices over the past month.
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