Tom’s Hardware reports that demand for the GeForce RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 graphics cards in the US is still so high that it’s nearly impossible to find them for sale at their recommended prices. Nvidia has found a solution for attendees of the GPU Technology Conference (GTC 2025), currently taking place in San Jose, California, USA. The company is selling the cards at their recommended prices right at the event.
Image source: NVIDIA
Nvidia has set up a food truck in the GTC 2025 parking lot, selling the GeForce RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 from its partners at suggested retail prices of $999 and $1,999, respectively. The food truck will be open from 7 a.m. to noon local time on Thursday and Friday. There are a few restrictions, though:
- Only GTC 2025 attendees who have paid $1,145 (for one day) or $2,295 (for five days) for entry tickets, or exhibition pass holders, will be able to purchase the graphics card.
- One buyer can purchase only one card.
- In total, Nvidia plans to sell 2,000 video cards – a thousand GeForce RTX 5080 and GeForce RTX 5090.
- The cards become available for purchase spontaneously. In other words, they are sold according to the flash sale principle. For example: “Over the next 30 minutes, 90 RTX 5090 graphics cards will be available for sale.”
This situation reminded us of how Nvidia was preparing to launch Ampere generation graphics cards in 2020. Then a video was released in which the company’s CEO Jensen Huang took a “freshly baked” server board with eight A100 computing accelerators out of the oven.
Some may consider such actions by Nvidia as mockery of fans and ordinary consumers who are waiting for video cards to appear in stores at reasonable prices. However, developers present at the conference will clearly evaluate the initiative positively, since they will be able to buy accelerators to work on software that can potentially stimulate demand for Nvidia products in the future.
On the other hand, Nvidia has been paying little attention to gamers in general lately, prioritizing the production of specialized GPUs for data centers. And this is logical, because Nvidia is much more profitable to sell super-expensive B100/B200 AI accelerators costing $50,000 each. However, this does not make things any easier for gamers.