At the graphics card counters in Shenzhen's Huaqiangbei electronics district, prices have been changing almost daily for the past two months. According to a visit reported by 21st Century Business Herald on October 24, the RTX 5090 launched at an official price of roughly 15,000 to 16,000 yuan, but current channel quotes have reached 55,000 to 60,000 yuan. Just over two weeks ago, the card was selling for around 30,000 yuan.
The trigger was a rumor that production had stopped. Xiong Rongrong, a manager at Jinshuoli Computer who has been in the components business in Huaqiangbei for 16 years, said: "I heard the RTX 5090 might stop shipping, and the market just came alive." According to the report, Nvidia has publicly denied halting production and confirmed it is still shipping, while also acknowledging that its supply chain is capacity-constrained. The article does not quote Nvidia directly.
One card, a different price every day
The increases go well beyond the flagship. The report gives the following price points:
- RTX 5080: about 8,000 yuan at launch, now about 17,000 yuan. Channel prices were around 12,000 yuan two weeks ago, and wholesale cost was around 11,000 yuan in early September.
- RTX 5060: previously about 2,300 yuan, now above 3,600 yuan.
- Storage drives and CPUs are largely stable, and memory even eased slightly in September and October.
The price of the same model can differ by one or two hundred yuan within two days, which is why vendors are reluctant to issue written quotes. Supply sits with authorized distributors of the major brands, the stock that stalls can keep in reserve is limited, and most of them restock according to spot-market prices.
A rough calculation of the increases: the RTX 5090's current price is 3.5 to 4 times its launch price, the RTX 5080 is about 2.1 times, and the entry-level RTX 5060 is up by more than half. The higher the tier, the steeper the rise. That fits the theory that capacity is being squeezed out by compute cards, and the 5090 is also the consumer card most often used to run large language models locally.
Cloud rental prices are following the same line
Prices are climbing at the data center end as well. a16z has published a GPU rental price index that sets January 1, 2026 at 100 and uses a seven-day moving average. As of October 19, it read:
| Model | Index (approx.) | Change this year |
|---|---|---|
| H200 | 265 | about +160% |
| B200 | 225 | about +120% |
| RTX PRO 6000 Workstation Edition | 165 | about +65% |
| H100 SXM | 137 | about +35% |
| A100 SXM4 | 102 | slightly above the start of the year |
Even the A100, which launched in 2020, has not fallen, and its rental price is slightly above where it began the year. Normally, older cards lose value year after year as new ones ramp up, but this year that depreciation curve has been basically flat.
Taken together, the two sets of figures show retail prices for consumer cards rising faster than data center rental prices. The former has a shorter price chain, so rumors and stockpiling can feed straight through to the counter. The latter has long-term contracts and multiple cloud providers acting as a hedge, so prices climb more gently.
Export orders are also competing for stock
A staff member at a stall in Huaqiang Electronics World said at least 10 overseas customers come in every day to ask about prices, with traffic even heavier during the Canton Fair in October. Most are from India and Russia, with more arriving from France, Italy and Brazil, buying monitors, motherboards and graphics cards in bulk. Online subsidies for the "Double 11" shopping festival have also pushed down web store prices, and because e-commerce platforms can get differentiated supply prices, the gap between online and offline prices has widened.
This staff member's view is that until consumer chip capacity increases noticeably, the shortage will be hard to ease, and price increases will most likely continue into early 2027. That is a vendor's judgment based on purchasing experience. Nvidia has given no capacity or supply timeline, so the claim cannot be verified at this point.
Sources: 21st Century Business Herald, Gelonghui, CocoLoop, a16z. Graphics card prices are channel quotes from Shenzhen's Huaqiangbei; rental prices follow a16z's seven-day moving average index.