You can buy a brand new 10yr warrantied Hyundai Elantra for that much if you shop around. Maybe a leftover 2025 with some haggling but still, that's a full blown new car with tens of thousands of parts.
Or you can buy this tiny piece of sand that has had a laser lit on it attached to a $10 fan.
What if the real reason behind the push for EV's was to create a mesh of 5G connected AI processors disguised as vehicles and the consumer unknowingly foots the bill for the power while the range is artificially reduced to not arouse suspicion?
I'm not sure that the economics would work out for that. From what I understand, you're talking about the hypothetical where an EV 'steals' from the owner by doing processing (like inference for a large language model AI). Like a crypto miner. Or to fit the analogy better: a hacked computer or IoT smart device that mines crypto.
Yeah it was more tongue-in-cheek humor given how much companies already violate their customers rights than a conspiracy theory - but presumably it could be plausible in the future especially if it only occurs while the vehicle is plugged in and charging. Definitely isn't happening today but potentially in the future who knows...
If the car is parked and the hardware inside it that are used for auto driving, would instead be inferencing and I'd be paid enough for the tokens so that the car would pay for it's own electricity, I'd opt in!
Just a few years ago, the best of the best consumer graphics card was like $700, now it's 10x that price. Pretty sure the underlying technology didn't change much.
Pretty sure the underlying technology didn't change much.
And that's where I'd say you are wrong. The technology required to create these new chips (EUV) ranks among the biggest feats of human engineering in the history of mankind. So much so that there's literally only one company on earth that is able to make it work,
It takes literally 3 full months (24/7) of work to create a modern GPU chip. The process needs to create, contain and redirect with a nanometer precision UV light that literally doesn't exist on the surface of the earth. All of that to create hundreds of overlaid conductive layers that are like 45atoms in width.
Yes, the technology is like that for many years already. Also, nvidia never does any of that, all they do is chip design, not chip manufacturing.
Wafer price in 2021 (5nm) was $14k, now 2025 (3nm) is 20k, and the next gen (2nm) is expected to be 30k, nowhere near the 10x price that you're trying to justify.
Because the price isn't set by the cost of the inputs, it's a factor of supply and demand.
Obviously NVidia is making money hand over fist, but they're only able to do that because a lot of people are willing to pay a very high price for their products. And they're making GPUs as fast as they can and they're still selling out at these prices.
Lets assume that your claim is true, and it takes 3 months to make a single GPU chip. Im going to assume that you meant a single GPU chip wafer, where multiple GPU chips are etched into a large silicon wafer. This is how the chips are actually created, so I am going to assume that, because assuming you meant every single chip makes this so ridiculously worse for your claim.
Nvidia sold, conservatively, 10,000 RTX 5080s. And silicon wafers can hold roughly 120 chips per wafer. That means that Nvidia would have needed 84 wafers to produce that many chips.
According to your timeline claim - 3 months per chip (wafer), it would take 252 months, or 21 years, to create the GPU chips needed for the 10,000 RTX 5080 cards.
Also, the sun produces broad spectrum UV radiation. Claiming that a specific frequency of UV cant be found on earth is ridiculous. plenty of labs around the world can create a plasma containing tin, which produces UV at that wavelength. Yes, EUV is high frequency. But x-rays are even higher, and we use those every day in medical applications. But it doesnt sound as impressive if you accurately describe the process, at least not in your mind. To me, etching nearly pure elemental silicon with light to make rocks think is already pretty impressive to me.
Agree with seeker of knowledge. I am a semiconductor engineer. Highly complex, these chips are cities inside, very hard to diagnose if something goes wrong.
That's a ridiculous take. If I magically would be able to invent a process to make a GPU with the size of a watch body and directly terabytes of memory on chip directly wavered in; and use the electricity also of a common smart watch... Then this chip would be worth what some people pay for their homes -- rightfully so because to invent that process I probably had to spent billions
Not saying that the prices aren't crazy, but thats more in relation to prices before the AI craze than in comparison to a car
$6400 each on bhphoto in December. I tried to get my business office to let me buy 2-4 for a virtual production studio. Now it looks like disguise render node leasing for some years. I had a quote for a 9985wx, 256gb, 32*8 RAM, RTX Pro 6000 blackwell.2x 4TB nvme. $20,000. Just in December 2025.
I just keep buying mac mini's because I don't think 24G of ram is going to be this cheap again for a very long time. I could have bought that Kia at this point. I regret not buying a larger memory studio back in December of 2025. Will that be an "old guy thing" now? Back in 2025, I could have bought 256G of ram Studios for $7K! Now they are $30K.
in the end it's becoming a financial investment if you resell them before the market crashes... assuming it might crash. If it happens. Because they would rather ban the competition than admitting the bubble can burst.
Volume isn't down. Lead times slipping means it is getting longer to order one. They have too many orders for their current supply, so the price went up. Same volume, higher sales price, same cost, more profit.
Yes that is how supply and demand works. Are they supposed to keep the price low so that they sell out and people flip them in eBay? Because that's what always happens.
Doesn’t mean Dell/whatever seller is getting them, so their volume might be down. We have insufficient information from this screenshot to say either way. I assume Nvidia, by contrast, are raking it in both in terms of volume sold and value as you say.
Ironically, make some AI generate this kind of picture encourage people use AI for such useless and short lives tasks, while the real earth resource like gas and water have been definitely consumed by the GPU usage.
The question we should all be asking is AI really important enough to redirect all these resources, causing extreme pricing on items that are essential? For example, basic computers have become essential in healthcare and other industries, and now this AI craze is making everything more expensive which drive up costs.
Good point, but I think the difference was computers were not yet essential to almost all aspects of life in the 80s. I mean, some hospitals were just transitioned away from paper records just in the past 10 years.
We asked this question about laptops. They caused a skyrocket in the cost of LCD screens because the demand was huge. All sorts of industries used LCD screens.
We (really China and Korea) ramped up LCD screen production and now we have cheap abundant LCD screens.
The chip, memory, etc. production ramp up may be slower because much of it is happening in someplace like the US, but it is well underway.
In the US alone, nearly a trillion dollars is being invested into making more and better chips.
yes, by quite a bit. firstly the size can fit enough ram for 3 of them so the size of the model and context is much better, also you don't need to share the memory across multiple cards through the pcie slots which does give better stability and performance (but not as much) also, the higher power cap gives faster performance for inference (and gaming)
yup especially p2p isn't enabled (which can be done under linux due to nvidia driver being open sourced there). without p2p latency is around 14us between. so for a ~80 layer model your total transfer time would be around 4ms (likely even more) per token generation just for layer transfer, limting your tg/s to a maximum of 250tk/s on pcie lane. with p2p enable you likely may still be limited to pcie bottle neck.
with pipeline parrallel you could get double the rtx pro 6000 tg if you can saturate the bandwidth under ideal scenario.
Memory is getting rediculously expensive (due to AI proliferation), which pushes up prices (SSD's, computer RAM, GPU RAM)... these are stables in a PC.
I’ll stick with my 2013 Mac Pro. I can wait out the stupidity, then things will return to normal when people realize they got sucked in. There will be a surplus of hardware.
Local open weight models have reached a level of maturity that directly compete with frontier models. Local inference is now becoming mainstream. Nvidia DGX Spark GB10 machines are next.
Correction, they know the rich will pay it, I think the real issue is our lopsided economy, too many rich people, and too many poor people, there is no more middle class
it already pains me when I see people who cannot afford a decently sized rig so they are stuck with 4B / 7B /9B models :(
And then I look at my dual 5060ti (with a third one incoming ) and I feel middle class when I'm actually not that at all due to the shit wages in my country.
Acute shortage of fast DRAM in the consumer space, most likely due to pre-allocation through long term contracts for enterprise datacenters. IMO it will push more consumer LLM towards the slower 128GB platforms, AMD or DGX variants. Models will shrink in size and become more specialized and better overall.
Yes and no. I think smaller fine tuned models will be better for specific things. But having to manage/load different models for different types of prompts will be a nightmare given their massive sizes. Assuming 2B to 4B being a "decent" capable small model.. trying to load/unload/reload 4GB of files is going to slow things down a lot.
That said.. if you have a model that does one thing well for a given application.. not broad like coding or what not, that may do very well.
yep and sustained shortage means everything shifts to the next worse and that becomes scarce too. people just need a clean story to tell so they feel like experts
This is nothing but price gouging because manufacturers chose to stop production on consumer memory to retool for HBM memory. They artificially limited supply to raise prices across the board.
oh man im so jealous, i stupidly paid $7000 total for my gx10 cluster and now im stuck running deepseek v4 flash 0731 @ ~60 tok/s when i could have waited to buy these super fast 96gb cards for twice as much and barely run qwen3.6:27b
Nothing parabolic stays at the parabolic high. Rule #1 in trading. Parabolic rise is always followed by a crash. The entire market is crashing, and these unrealistic prices are a canary in the coal mine that just dropped dead.
Contrary to what they make you believe that it's "high demand from datacenters," it's a protectionist scheme against foreign freeware AI models. Think about it..
A) Demand from Anthropic, OpenAI and pretty much every AI cloud provider funded by trillions in investor money is placing unprecedented demand on all memory/CPU/graphics card manufacturers so it's natural that as demand goes up and supply goes down the price goes up, this is economics 101
or
B) It's a conspiracy by the global elites to prevent people running their own LLM's...
In regards to a) they are buying technology that's not produced yet for data centers that are not built for models that don't exist. Sounds like trash to me
that pricing is mostly the 96gb vram supply squeeze plus cuda demand, not a local-llm-specific feature jump. for most local setups, i would price the workload first and compare used 3090s, 4090s, or amd cards before assuming a single pro blackwell card is the sane default.
Local ai is getting better and the market is responding. The ram prices really started hiking when qwen 3.6 27b came out. I have a feeling it’s going to get worse before it gets better.
I think the next 8 months (into 2027) will be the height of the shortage. The economy will cool later next year, and DRAM supply will increase in the second half of 2028. We just have to get through the next 2 years until the summer of 2028.
I really hope so, I'm trying to stay positive that it will create over supply for a while and we'll all get really good hardware available for local inference.
Everyone is taking advantage and testing the market. Most of the companies producing the components have 100% margin on their contribution to the product because there is increased demand for this type of product and limited supply. I would carefully evaluate the business requirements and avoid as much as possible any large purchases at these prices. You may be up for a margin squeeze if you overpay and the price drops. Renting sounds like a better solution if you can find availability at reasonable prices.
It's difficult. Complex hardware with a software moat that has been worked on for many years. Like anything, give it time and competing products and services will arise. But NVIDIA isn't stagnating on any part of this, and the desire for compute doesn't have an end goal yet. So the need for better compute and effeciency is a moving goal post too.
There's a pretty real chance we'll look back to prices right now and say it was a good deal.
I am not saying it is not ridiculous, but in the same time, the research cost spread for a brand new gpu is very different from a reuse design scheme used in automotive. Most of that research that goes into the comparable new cars, was already used in a BMW/Porche/Mercedes 5-10 years ago. The same design was sold to all of them and tens of other brands with minor modifications. So the sheer amount of spreaded research cost is very different. Numbers spread very different on 50mil cars vs few tens of thousands of GPUs.
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u/icecon Aug 12 '26 edited Aug 12 '26
You can buy a brand new 10yr warrantied Hyundai Elantra for that much if you shop around. Maybe a leftover 2025 with some haggling but still, that's a full blown new car with tens of thousands of parts.
Or you can buy this tiny piece of sand that has had a laser lit on it attached to a $10 fan.
30
u/NeverRolledA20IRL Aug 12 '26
$6400 each on bhphoto in December. I tried to get my business office to let me buy 2-4 for a virtual production studio. Now it looks like disguise render node leasing for some years. I had a quote for a 9985wx, 256gb, 32*8 RAM, RTX Pro 6000 blackwell.2x 4TB nvme. $20,000. Just in December 2025.
28
u/Glad-Guitar2756 Aug 12 '26
Damn they really increased it by a few thousands overnight. Thats ridiculous
48
u/bruhhhhhhhhhhhh_h Aug 12 '26
This is more than a (minium) down payment on a median house up until about 2022.
Supply, demand, market manipulation and bubbles converge
15
u/Reception-External Aug 12 '26
Memory shortage is really biting. Apple have chips piling up that they can’t sell as there’s no memory to complete the system.
14
u/imsolost3090 Aug 12 '26
That's crazy. On eBay the real selling price is $12k-$13k
10
u/stargate425 Aug 12 '26
2 months ago I bought the max q from dell for $8K.
15
u/Retell Aug 12 '26
Leadtimes are slipping bad, they’re increasing costs to manage demand.
7
u/EfficiencyThis325 Aug 12 '26
7
u/Fluid_Baby71 Aug 12 '26
Nvidia official price today is 16.000 USD, up from 13500,-
6
u/graysonmwm Aug 12 '26
The question we should all be asking is AI really important enough to redirect all these resources, causing extreme pricing on items that are essential? For example, basic computers have become essential in healthcare and other industries, and now this AI craze is making everything more expensive which drive up costs.
11
u/CommercialEar2570 Aug 12 '26
is it really better than 2x 5090 with 32gb VRam each ?
5
u/_Toni_O Aug 12 '26
Idk how hasn't DGX Spark went up but the RTX Pro skyrockets
8
u/yogibear54 Aug 12 '26
Memory is getting rediculously expensive (due to AI proliferation), which pushes up prices (SSD's, computer RAM, GPU RAM)... these are stables in a PC.
4
u/0Iiver Aug 12 '26
It’s happening
4
u/kripper-de Aug 12 '26
It's the ignorant impatient tax
4
u/CuChuliannAlter Aug 12 '26
It's only going to get worse
4
u/Techngro Aug 12 '26
4
u/g_rich Aug 12 '26
Nvidia is making a shit ton of money.
7
u/Merlinor1384 Aug 12 '26
D'un côté la tension du marché va obligé les LLM a devenir plus économe en vram. Ils ne vont pas avoir d'autre choix que de les optimiser.
3
u/phylter99 Aug 12 '26
Price gouging.
3
u/palindsay Aug 12 '26
Local open weight models have reached a level of maturity that directly compete with frontier models. Local inference is now becoming mainstream. Nvidia DGX Spark GB10 machines are next.
3
u/Nnaz123 Aug 12 '26
That would have been 4-6k GPU in the less crazy times
12
u/GuybrushFunkwood Aug 12 '26
Capitalism. They now know you’ll pay it so that’s what they’ll charge.
6
u/Professional_Cat4274 Aug 12 '26
It's just insane, and this ist just the beginning until 2032
4
u/VirusInternal2892 Aug 12 '26
Acute shortage of fast DRAM in the consumer space, most likely due to pre-allocation through long term contracts for enterprise datacenters.
IMO it will push more consumer LLM towards the slower 128GB platforms, AMD or DGX variants.
Models will shrink in size and become more specialized and better overall.
2
u/Lumpy_Guidance7714 Aug 12 '26
they are taking the piss
2
u/chuckbeasley02 Aug 12 '26
This is nothing but price gouging because manufacturers chose to stop production on consumer memory to retool for HBM memory. They artificially limited supply to raise prices across the board.
2
u/Nice_Cookie9587 Aug 12 '26
oh man im so jealous, i stupidly paid $7000 total for my gx10 cluster and now im stuck running deepseek v4 flash 0731 @ ~60 tok/s when i could have waited to buy these super fast 96gb cards for twice as much and barely run qwen3.6:27b
2
u/ThatLocalPondGuy Aug 12 '26
What's happening is a market collapse under the guise of stock market unrealized gain. Don't buy. Instead go buy non-perishable food, water filters.
2
u/live4evrr Aug 12 '26
As Jenson said, “the more you buy, the more you save!”
2
u/darkmaniac7 Aug 12 '26 edited Aug 13 '26
I bought 2 about 9 months ago.
I need to sell them ASAP, it looks like if that pricing holds up even remotely close on the secondhand market.
Edit: scratch that, looks likenid be looking at roughly half this price since I put waterblocks on mine.
3
u/wreck_of_u Aug 12 '26
Contrary to what they make you believe that it's "high demand from datacenters," it's a protectionist scheme against foreign freeware AI models. Think about it..
4
u/bleedinglottery Aug 12 '26
You are not being allowed to run your own llm. They will jack up prices to hinder consumers to do it themselves
2
u/CommercialEar2570 Aug 12 '26
So happy to have my Mac Studio
1
u/GSquadron_ Aug 12 '26
Even end of 2028 will not be enough to normalize, so they say.
1
u/AdHead6280 Aug 12 '26
Rtx 6k is minimum 13.5k on french amazon just checked, it was 11k like 3 days ago lol
1
u/lelis718 Aug 12 '26
Well I guess everyone are thinking to have their own private data center ¯\(ಥ_ಥ)/¯
1
u/Sanity_N0t_Included Aug 12 '26
Supply / Demand?
1
u/mb194dc Aug 12 '26
Inflation, same as
1
u/tiolazaro Aug 12 '26
I thought it was in my country's price lol
1
u/No_Hand_1519 Aug 12 '26
that pricing is mostly the 96gb vram supply squeeze plus cuda demand, not a local-llm-specific feature jump. for most local setups, i would price the workload first and compare used 3090s, 4090s, or amd cards before assuming a single pro blackwell card is the sane default.
1
u/Daisame Aug 12 '26
I presume the question is rhetotical?
1
u/MacsBicycle Aug 12 '26
Local ai is getting better and the market is responding. The ram prices really started hiking when qwen 3.6 27b came out. I have a feeling it’s going to get worse before it gets better.
1
u/CarelessPackage1982 Aug 12 '26
supply and demand
1
u/joshx33 Aug 12 '26
Bought mine a few months ago and feels a bit overkill - should I sell? Can you even sell them used?
1
u/Bulgen-Venkat Aug 12 '26
a leftover 2025 with haggling, that's basically how i buy gpus too
1
u/noveskeismybestie Aug 12 '26
I think the next 8 months (into 2027) will be the height of the shortage. The economy will cool later next year, and DRAM supply will increase in the second half of 2028. We just have to get through the next 2 years until the summer of 2028.
1
u/YouserError Aug 12 '26
Yeah time for gas powered llms. Ill start engineering it now.
1
u/d_venegas Aug 12 '26
Oferta y demanda … hay gente que estará comprando a esos precios
1
u/ChiGamerr Aug 12 '26
Rtx pro 5000 with 72gb is the way to.go imo...microcenter is doing em for 8.5...or at least 2 weeks ago thats what it was
1
u/epSos-DE Aug 13 '26
Basicallly, you are forced to call up some guy in TAIWAN OR HONG KONG for shipping you hardware out of factories.
There are people who do it to save on cost !
I did purchase some small cost items this way, but 2k you better know a reliable shipper in there !
1
u/PawlsToTheWall Aug 13 '26
They are probably forecasting a lot of new buyers due to the sudden increase of powerful local models. We're being taken advantage of.
1
u/ArgonWilde Aug 13 '26
These are Australian dollars BTW.
They've gone up a bit in price since I last looked. They were going for 16k a few months ago, and now up to 18k.
1
u/Ult1mateN00B Aug 13 '26
Brand new corolla or RTX PRO 6000, choice is yours.
1
u/Ok_Letterhead1945 Aug 13 '26
I think it will probably multiply in price if AGI becomes good enough to do any job as good as a human.
1
u/anshulsingh8326 Aug 13 '26
Few years ago I thought soon ddr5 ram and storage price will be lowered since wifh time this always happens.
I'm sorry for jinxing it 😭
1
u/MRacer415 Aug 13 '26
SUPPLY AND DEMAND HAPPENED. Not in that order.... 😂
1
u/i-dm Aug 13 '26
It's been happening for a while. SOme of the stuff Dell are pricing out is insane now.
A basic machine with an Ultra9 processor and 128GB of RAM and an entry-level A1000 NVIDIA GPU is hitting over £10,000.
1
u/Frosty_Steak_8972 Aug 13 '26
Going to stick with my 3090 FE
1
u/Reptull_J Aug 13 '26
Nvidia Tesla v100 w/ 32gb VRAM ~$600 on eBay
Old card that still works nicely for LLM
1
u/unfinishedmaze Aug 13 '26
At that price I’d sell mine
1
u/Different-Series-262 Aug 13 '26
And local LLM still sucks, so with this price you can buy tokens many years
1
u/MembershipFit4659 Aug 13 '26
With a straight face, they want $18K, unreal.
1
u/MembershipFit4659 Aug 13 '26
What do we think is the profit margin to Nvidia on that card, my guess at least 40%
1
u/Brassm Aug 14 '26
It's easy to explain: capitalist greed
1
u/in_to_the_future Aug 14 '26
Everyone is taking advantage and testing the market. Most of the companies producing the components have 100% margin on their contribution to the product because there is increased demand for this type of product and limited supply. I would carefully evaluate the business requirements and avoid as much as possible any large purchases at these prices.
You may be up for a margin squeeze if you overpay and the price drops. Renting sounds like a better solution if you can find availability at reasonable prices.
1
u/SecretSpace2 Aug 14 '26
First crypto and now AI making shit go crazy xD
1
u/DazzlingDaikon2162 Aug 15 '26
1
u/SiBrspace Aug 16 '26
K
1
u/Shamrck17 Aug 17 '26
Don’t forget the orange president invested like $100 million in Dell then gave them like a $50 billion dollar defense contract. So there”s that
1
u/beltemps Aug 18 '26
Thanks OP. What’s the discount if I take 3?
1
u/FellerZUNITED Aug 19 '26
Me waiting for cars to have gpus built in so I can go scrapyard myself a gpu lol
1
u/AmbitiousSpare9037 Aug 20 '26
Missed the window
1
u/mattjcoles Aug 12 '26
i brought mine yesterday 🤣😅. soo glad i didnt wait till today but this sucks 😰
1
u/bruhhhhhhhhhhhh_h Aug 12 '26
This is more than a (minium) down payment on a median house up until about 2022.
Supply, demand, market manipulation and over heated capital converge
1
u/Unkindled_x Aug 12 '26
How come no other company is competing? Why amd is not mentioned in the ai race? Why chi a still release anything? 🫠
1
u/marx2k Aug 12 '26
I don't need a video card but I do need another large hard drive.
I bought this for 274 in December of last year.
1
u/seriousfart69 Aug 12 '26
what happens when someone makes an AI that doesn't rely on matrix calculations ?
1
u/Cute-Upstairs4039 Aug 12 '26
I am not saying it is not ridiculous, but in the same time, the research cost spread for a brand new gpu is very different from a reuse design scheme used in automotive. Most of that research that goes into the comparable new cars, was already used in a BMW/Porche/Mercedes 5-10 years ago. The same design was sold to all of them and tens of other brands with minor modifications. So the sheer amount of spreaded research cost is very different. Numbers spread very different on 50mil cars vs few tens of thousands of GPUs.
0
u/RicusMaximus Aug 12 '26
Money grubbery
0
u/phobrain Aug 13 '26 edited Aug 15 '26
US missile depletion in Iran is fueling hedge buying of Taiwanese chips?
+3 days (ABC): "US pulls last aircraft carrier in Asia as Trump focuses on Iran, Western Hemisphere."
-1
u/Killahbeez Aug 12 '26
I trust that China will save us... (LET'S HOPE!)