October 26, 2026
Nvidia's flagship gaming GPU may be on its way out. Several leakers claim Nvidia has stopped producing the GeForce RTX 5090 so it can steer its GB202 chips toward more profitable RTX Pro workstation cards built for AI developers. Nvidia says the card hasn't been discontinued. Either way, almost no one can buy an RTX 5090 at anything close to its original price.
The rumor began with leaker @hongxing2020, who shared what was described as a leaked factory notice. Fellow leaker MEGAsizeGPU (@Zed__Wang) backed it up, saying there would be no more GB202 chips for the 5090. According to the leaks:
All RTX 5090 models end: Production would stop on every RTX 5090 variant, including the China-specific RTX 5090 D models.
GB202 goes pro: Future GB202 chips would go only to RTX Pro cards.
A new top GeForce card: A rumored RTX 5080 24GB would become Nvidia's top consumer GPU, and the current RTX 5080 16GB would also be discontinued.
Sell-through: RTX 5090 cards already in the channel would stay on shelves until they sell out.
A separate retail leak reportedly points to January 2027 as the date the RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 16GB would be discontinued.
It comes down to margins. The GB202 chip in the RTX 5090 also powers Nvidia's professional cards, including the 96GB RTX Pro 6000, which reportedly sells for around $15,000. Every GB202 that goes into a $1,999 gaming card is one that could have gone into a far more expensive workstation card. Selling a cheaper consumer card with the same silicon also risks cannibalizing those pro sales.
An ongoing memory shortage, driven largely by AI data center demand, makes the math even more lopsided. With memory scarce and data centers willing to pay a premium, Nvidia has every reason to prioritize its highest-margin products.
The timing of Nvidia's newest workstation card adds weight to the rumor. In September, Nvidia announced the RTX Pro 5500, a Blackwell workstation GPU with 84GB of GDDR7 memory. According to reporting on the launch, it uses the same GB202 chip as the RTX 5090 and has exactly the same number of CUDA cores. On paper, it is essentially an RTX 5090 with more than two and a half times the memory.
Spec | RTX 5090 | RTX Pro 5500 |
|---|---|---|
GPU | GB202 (Blackwell) | GB202 (Blackwell) |
CUDA cores | 21,760 | 21,760 |
Memory | 32GB GDDR7 | 84GB GDDR7 with ECC |
Memory bus | 512-bit | 416-bit (reported) |
Memory bandwidth | 1,792 GB/s | 1,398 GB/s |
Max power | 575W | 600W |
Price | $1,999 MSRP | Not announced |
There is one notable trade-off: the RTX Pro 5500 has a narrower memory bus, so its bandwidth is about 22% lower than the RTX 5090's. In exchange, it adds workstation features, including ECC memory and support for splitting the card into two 42GB instances for separate workloads. Nvidia is pitching it for AI inference, generative and agentic AI, simulation, and rendering.
Nvidia hasn't announced pricing, and its product page still lists the card as coming soon. Given that the 96GB RTX Pro 6000 reportedly sells for around $15,000, the RTX Pro 5500 is expected to cost far more than the RTX 5090's original price. That's exactly why the rumor makes sense: if the same GB202 chip can go into a card that sells for several times as much, the 5090 becomes a hard product for Nvidia to justify.
Nvidia has pushed back. Speaking to Taiwanese media after an event in Taipei on October 16, Jeff Fisher, Nvidia's senior vice president of personal computing, said the RTX 5090 has not been discontinued and that the company plans to keep shipping it. He acknowledged, though, that supply remains constrained and said Nvidia is doing what it can to get product to market.
Retail signs aren't reassuring:
The RTX 5090 can no longer be purchased from Nvidia's own store.
Nvidia removed the card from its Marketplace model selection.
Micro Center has marked several RTX 5090 models as "Not Carried."
The RTX 5090 launched in January 2025 at $1,999. Today, prices are several times higher. Recent listings range from about $7,800 on Amazon to $9,000 to $11,000 at Newegg, with only rare reports of in-store prices under $5,000. Prices across the RTX 50 series have climbed since late 2025, with the biggest jumps on cards with more than 8GB of VRAM.
Does it really matter whether the RTX 5090 has been officially discontinued? At $8,000 to $10,000, it's already out of reach for nearly every gamer. Whether Nvidia formally ends production or the card just stays priced at four to five times its MSRP, the result is the same: the RTX 5090 is no longer a gaming card most people can realistically buy.
This story is based on unconfirmed leaks and will be updated if Nvidia shares more details.
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