Nvidia’s RTX 5000 series GPUs for consumers have remained elusive since launch with the RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 GPUs being increasingly difficult to find on shelves at most major retailers worldwide. This has led many to call Nvidia’s initially limited inventory akin to a ‘paper launch’ when it came to addressing global demand.
This has also led to significant price gouging as Nvidia’s stated ‘stock-outs’ came to fruition, but desktop PC gamers might not be the only ones affected in 2025, based on a report by Taiwanese publication Digitimes.
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Delayed RTX 50 Series Laptops On The Cards
As per Digitimes’ coverage, based on information available from supply chain insiders, Nvidia’s RTX 5000 series laptop GPUs are not currently a priority for Nvidia, which has renewed focus over the past few years to work near-exclusively on its Blackwell-based AI server solutions. This is something that makes up more than three-quarters of its total revenue and is anticipated to grow quarter on quarter when it reports earnings later this month.
This has led to estimates pushing release dates for Nvidia’s RTX 50 series-based laptops from a variety of industry players further, with the publication noting that one now expects the laptops, which were due to release towards the end of January 2025, to split their launch between March and April this year. The higher-end models are anticipated to be released in March while the lower-end models are expected to be pushed back to as late as April this year.
This means that retailers have additional time to clear inventory even as we see more aggressive sales across the board for notebooks with RTX 4000 series GPUs, as well as the emergence of information including specs of newer RTX 50 series-based notebooks that do not yet have release dates as part of the equation.
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A DLSS-Induced Scalping Opportunity Like No Other
This comes at the back of the confirmed desktop-class RTX 5070 Ti launch on February 20 with the RTX 5070’s exact launch date remaining elusive for end-users. The shortage for the highest-end RTX 5090 and penultimate RTX 5080 GPUs has, however, translated to the former in particular being scalped for a high multiple of its already gargantuan asking price.
This is even as AIBs pile onto the cost by offering SKUs such as the ASUS ROG Strix Astral OC SKU for as much as $2799 with recently imposed tariffs pushing prices up to $3079. The liquid-cooled edition of the same is available for as much as $3409.
Scalped units for these SKUs can run anywhere from $4000 to $7000 on third party retailers and community-drive marketplaces, making for a rather grim reality that might see itself play out yet again for both Nvidia’s newer budget-centric desktop-class GPUs as well as laptops sporting these chips. This does mean that gaming laptops sporting newer Nvidia chips could trade at a considerable multiple over their MSRPs for a few weeks or months as supply adjusts to keep up with demand at launch, assuming the current situation persists.
Against the backdrop of AI-induced workloads and the highest-end RTX 5090 mobile chipset offering as much as 24GB of GDDR7 memory, a shortage of desktop chips could result in a spillover of PC gamers and AI power users demanding laptop-class GPUs, much like a situation earlier this decade that saw crypto miners even rigging multiple high-end laptops together for mining popular cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum in the past.
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