Scalpers made an official comeback with the launch of the RTX 5090 and the RTX 5080, NVIDIA’s newest flagship cards. Now, it looks like supply for the RTX 5070 and 5070 Ti might be similarly dire.
Demand for the RTX 5070 Ti and the RTX 5070 is expected to surpass supply again, leading to a shortage situation. This is already manifesting itself in retail prices, as some RTX 5070 Ti models at retailers like Best Buy have an MSRP of up to $900, just $100 shy of the RTX 5080 Founders Edition’ retail price. It should be noted that the RTX 5080 and 5090 series cards already saw price hikes as well. These higher prices are also partly the fault of the threat of tariffs by the Trump administration, as well as other factors, but the higher demand definitely plays a major role.
Retail sources are also hinting that supply for the 5070 Ti might be about the same as that for the RTX 5080 and 5090. The RTX 5070 Ti is coming out this Thursday starting at $749 (again, you could see retail prices as high as $900), and the non-Ti RTX 5070 isn’t coming out until March 5th. Most of the reports we’re seeing are related to the RTX 5070 Ti specifically, but at this point it’s safe to assume that the non-Ti model will suffer from availability issues as well.
This isn’t exactly coming as a surprise. If NVIDIA is struggling to keep up with demand for the more expensive batch of cards, it’s a given that the cheaper models (which will almost certainly see even more demand) will struggle too. There is a silver lining here. Some of NVIDIA’s data center GPUs are selling worse than expected, so TSMC is reportedly repurposing excess yields for those GPUs into RTX 5000-series cards. These wafers fit the RTX 5090, so it wouldn’t matter much for the lower-end cards. But we need to start somewhere.
Source: VideoCardz, Tom’s Hardware (1, 2)
