RTX 5090 not discontinued, yet €6,800 to €9,999: what it means for local LLM builds

On Friday Nvidia threw launch parties for RTX Spark around the world, and by Saturday the German headlines were about a different product, the RTX 5090. ComputerBase reported on 17 October 2026, citing 4Gamers, that Nvidia rejects rumours of an end of life for the card. In the same week it is nearly sold out in Germany. If you are building a local LLM machine, the second fact matters more.

Sources: ComputerBase, 17 October 2026, and GamePro, 19 October 2026. The denial is a vendor statement. (Quelle: Simple Icons, file nvidia.svg (CC0))

What Nvidia says

Jeff Fisher, responsible for Personal Computing at Nvidia, is quoted by ComputerBase as saying the RTX 5090 has not been discontinued and Nvidia will keep shipping it. He noted that other variants of the RTX 5090 chip exist, but the card itself has not been discontinued. He added that the supply chain is indeed somewhat constrained. GamePro reports the same statement and has Fisher calling the card an important core product.

One detail goes with the denial. The card dropped out of Nvidia's online store towards the end of the week and came back on Saturday as a listing on the German and US sites. The Founders Edition still cannot be ordered.

What retail looks like

ComputerBase puts the last available cards at €6,800 to €9,999. GamePro writes of over €6,500, with individual sales at €8,000 or €11,000. The list price has not moved: US$1,999, which is €2,099 in Germany.

Price range for the last available cards according to ComputerBase; list price from the same source. (Quelle: ComputerBase, 17 Oct 2026)

GamePro adds a story from Brazil. The distributor Oderço expected two pallets of Zotac RTX 5090 cards for an electronics wholesaler. Tracking shows them arriving at Guarulhos airport near São Paulo, and then the trail ends. The distributor puts the purchase value at over €440,000. It is one affected party's account, but it shows what these cards are worth right now.

Rumours ComputerBase reports

The GB202 chip is no longer sold to OEMs and is reserved for the RTX Pro 6000 workstation card.
An RTX 5080 with 24 GB instead of 16 GB could become the new top GeForce model.
RTX 5090 cards are being deployed in AI data centres in Asia.

None of this is established. A purchase decision built on it rests on rumour.

The arithmetic for a local LLM box

We run four RTX 5090 in one host. The sums below apply to anyone who has to buy today. A 5090 carries 32 GB of VRAM. At the €2,099 list price that is about €66 per gigabyte. At €6,800 it is about €213, at €9,999 about €312. We did the division ourselves from the quoted prices; it is not a market statistic.

For local models, memory counts for more than compute, because the weights and the KV cache have to fit. A markup of three to five times therefore changes the question from "which card" to "how much model do I actually need". Quantised models with few active parameters run on smaller cards, and at larger quantities workstation cards are an alternative. We compare the RTX Pro 5500 and the 5090 in a separate post.

Two things the news does not change. A card you cannot buy does not help you plan, whether or not Nvidia officially keeps it in the range. And a denial about the product line is not a delivery date: Fisher himself says supply is tight.

For a purchase that means: unless something fails this week, do not order at €9,999. Write down the memory you need in gigabytes and check whether a smaller or differently built card covers it. If you already run these cards, count your spares and check warranty now, because a failure has just become expensive.