Nvidia says RTX 5090 isn't discontinued, but supply is tight

Nvidia has finally answered a week of rumours about its fastest gaming graphics card. Jeff Fisher, the company's senior vice president for personal computing, says the GeForce RTX 5090 has not been discontinued and that Nvidia will keep shipping it. He made the comments to Taiwanese media at an RTX Spark launch event in Taipei on October 16, as reported by Taiwan's Central News Agency (CNA) and summarised in English by Tom's Hardware.

Where the rumour came from

On October 10, well-known hardware leakers claimed that Nvidia had stopped supplying the large GB202 chip for new RTX 5090 boards, including the China-only "D" versions, so that the silicon could go to professional RTX PRO cards instead. A purported factory notice added that a 24GB RTX 5080 would become the top GeForce card. Nvidia did not comment at the time.

The story gained weight when the RTX 5090 disappeared from Nvidia's own online store and some big retailers, including Micro Center, stopped listing it.

What Nvidia says now

According to CNA, Fisher said the end-of-life reports are "not true", that the RTX 5090 remains a "super important" part of Nvidia's line-up and that the company will continue to supply it. He also stressed how much gaming still matters to Nvidia: without GeForce, he said, there would be no Nvidia today, because GeForce led to CUDA and CUDA helped spark the AI boom.

He did not deny the shortage. Fisher said supply constraints are affecting the whole industry, not only Nvidia, and that his team is doing everything it can to get products to market. Taiwanese outlets link the squeeze to memory: the RTX 5090 carries 32GB of GDDR7, and memory makers have been shifting capacity to AI hardware.

What it means for buyers

"Not discontinued" is not the same as "easy to buy". The RTX 5090 launched in January 2025 at $1,999. When Tom's Hardware checked US stores after Fisher's comments, Best Buy had no stock, Amazon listings from third-party sellers were around $8,500, and the card was still absent from Nvidia's store and Micro Center. Nvidia has not announced an RTX 5080 24GB.

If you are speccing a new PC for AI work rather than gaming, our guide to choosing a laptop for local AI covers the alternatives, including the new RTX Spark laptops that went on sale the same day. And with memory prices this high, it is worth checking how much RAM you really need.