Nvidia's GPU Shortages and the Antitrust Question

I've been following Nvidia's pricing and the recent reports about the 5090, and I'm starting to wonder how much longer this can go on before somebody seriously investigates their supply practices.

The 5090 launched at $1,999. We're now seeing listings around $5,000, sometimes higher. And frankly, MSRP has been a joke for most of this generation.
Now there are reports that Nvidia may have stopped allocating new GB202 chips to consumer 5090 manufacturers, favoring professional and AI products instead.

Nvidia says the 5090 isn't discontinued. Okay, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're still allocating new chips to board partners at the same rate. Are they actually maintaining production for consumers, or just continuing shipments from existing inventory?
I'd like to know. Because Nvidia controls the chips. ASUS, MSI, Gigabyte, and the other manufacturers can't build these cards without them. So while Nvidia might not directly set retail prices, it absolutely influences how much product makes it to market.

And there's another part to this that I think deserves more attention. If the 5090 becomes practically unavailable, what's Nvidia's next flagship for consumers? The 5080.

Now you've got people who would've bought a 5090 looking at a 5080 instead. That puts additional demand on the 5080, which is already expensive and impossible to find at MSRP. Buyers who can't justify that price start looking at the 5070 Ti, and the same thing can happen further down the lineup.

Look at some of the retail prices we've been seeing:

• 5090: $1,999 MSRP, around $5,000 retail
• 5080: $999 MSRP, around $1,700 retail
• 5070 Ti: $749 MSRP, around $1,200 retail
• 5070: $549 MSRP, around $900 retail
• 5060 Ti 16GB: $429 MSRP, around $800 retail

Those are rounded-up examples of listings, not averages across every retailer. But still, look at those numbers. You don't have to raise MSRP to influence what consumers end up paying. And if supply at the top of the lineup dries up, the pricing pressure doesn't necessarily stay at the top.

Now consider Nvidia's financial position. For fiscal 2026, they reported $193.7 billion in Data Center revenue compared to $16 billion in Gaming.
Twelve times the revenue. So obviously theres a massive incentive to prioritize AI hardware. I don't have a problem with Nvidia making money, and I'm not suggesting they should be forced to manufacture unlimited gaming GPUs.

What I have a problem with is the idea that Nvidia has little responsibility for what's happening to consumer pricing when it controls the supply of the chips these cards depend on.
There's a difference between being unable to meet demand and deciding to allocate less product to a market. Both can be legal, but they're not the same thing.
And if any of those allocation decisions involve restrictive agreements or practices that unlawfully protect Nvidia's market position, then we're getting into antitrust territory.

Section 2 of the Sherman Act deals with maintaining monopoly power through exclusionary conduct. High prices alone aren't enough to establish a violation. Neither is prioritizing AI over gaming.
But that doesn't mean Nvidia's supply and distribution practices are automatically beyond scrutiny.

Nvidia has already disclosed that competition regulators have requested information about its GPU sales and supply allocation practices.
I'd like to see some actual numbers. How many consumer GPUs are they capable of producing? How many are being allocated to board partners? Are those allocations being reduced? And what restrictions, if any, are placed on those partners?
Especially with the 5090 reports.

I'm not saying Nvidia has definitely stopped producing consumer 5090s. Those reports haven't been confirmed, and Nvidia disputes them.
But if the flagship is effectively being pushed out of the consumer market, that potentially changes demand throughout the rest of the lineup. The 5080 becomes the top realistically available card, and everything below it can experience additional pricing pressure.
I don't think it's unreasonable to question whether that's simply an unavoidable consequence of manufacturing constraints or whether Nvidia's business decisions are contributing to it.
And to be clear, I'm not claiming that expensive GPUs automatically equal an antitrust violation. I'm questioning whether there's enough market influence, financial incentive, and potential competitive harm here to justify an investigation into Nvidia's actual allocation and distribution practices. I think there is.

If Nvidia's shortages are legitimate, fine. But I'd like to see that established through evidence rather than just taking their word for it. Because when a $1,999 graphics card is being listed for $5,000, and the rest of the lineup is following with ridiculous pricing of its own, I think consumers have every reason to start questioning who's making the supply decisions.
And whether Nvidia is deliberately creating or maintaining shortages that drive up consumer prices while protecting its own market position.

And there's also the GDDR7 memory shortage to consider. Nvidia isn't just competing for GPU manufacturing capacity; its massive AI business also gives it considerable purchasing power with memory suppliers like Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron.
I understand AI accelerators primarily use HBM rather than GDDR7, but these companies still have to decide where to invest their manufacturing capacity and which customers get priority. Given Nvidia's financial influence, I think it's fair to question how much leverage it has over those decisions and whether that affects consumer GPU availability.
A legitimate memory shortage doesn't automatically mean Nvidia has no influence over how limited supplies are allocated.

Ultimately, I'd like to see more transparency around Nvidia's supply and allocation decisions. There may be perfectly legitimate reasons for the shortages and pricing we're seeing, but given Nvidia's influence across the GPU industry, I think there's enough here to warrant a closer look by regulators.

In the consumer space you aren't going to get anywhere. nVidia has real competition in the form of AMD. Both the fact that AMD is what runs in the game consoles and the fact that an AMD card is a literal drop-in replacement in systems means that you'd have a hard time arguing any sort of monopoly. Yes, I get that AMD doesn't compete on every level but that isn't what you look at in things like this. The fact of the matter is that anyone who wants to can just go and get an AMD card instead of an nVidia card, and it'll work. Likewise nVidia clearly hasn't squeezed them out of the OEM market as both MS and Sony have elected to use AMD instead of nVidia in their consoles, only Nintendo uses nVidia.

In the enterprise market you could try, but there again we are seeing competition from not only Broadcom, but also from in-house solutions. Google, Amazon, etc are developing their own in-house AI chips (in reality just modifications on ARM, but whatever). Still more arguable as they've done some real strong-arming in the enterprise arena, but I think you'd find it a fairly hard case to make when they can point other companies doing their own shit.


You also have to remember companies don't owe you shit: nVidia is not required to make ANY gaming cards, much less a 5090. They could just shut down that business. If there were IBM, they would, since it isn't as profitable as enterprise. A company reducing or abandoning a market is not an anti-trust issue, quite the opposite as if they don't compete in it any longer, it lets other companies compete easier.

Likewise just charging high prices isn't an anti-trust issue on its own. The company has to be doing it AND they have to have market dominance AND be preventing others from competing somehow. The fact that AMD will happily sell you a GPU for less money is counter to that. They aren't as good, but that's fine. It is legal to charge more money for a better product (or hell even a worse one if you can figure out how to market it).

Sycraft said:

In the consumer space you aren't going to get anywhere. nVidia has real competition in the form of AMD. Both the fact that AMD is what runs in the game consoles and the fact that an AMD card is a literal drop-in replacement in systems means that you'd have a hard time arguing any sort of monopoly. Yes, I get that AMD doesn't compete on every level but that isn't what you look at in things like this. The fact of the matter is that anyone who wants to can just go and get an AMD card instead of an nVidia card, and it'll work. Likewise nVidia clearly hasn't squeezed them out of the OEM market as both MS and Sony have elected to use AMD instead of nVidia in their consoles, only Nintendo uses nVidia.

In the enterprise market you could try, but there again we are seeing competition from not only Broadcom, but also from in-house solutions. Google, Amazon, etc are developing their own in-house AI chips (in reality just modifications on ARM, but whatever). Still more arguable as they've done some real strong-arming in the enterprise arena, but I think you'd find it a fairly hard case to make when they can point other companies doing their own shit.


You also have to remember companies don't owe you shit: nVidia is not required to make ANY gaming cards, much less a 5090. They could just shut down that business. If there were IBM, they would, since it isn't as profitable as enterprise. A company reducing or abandoning a market is not an anti-trust issue, quite the opposite as if they don't compete in it any longer, it lets other companies compete easier.

Likewise just charging high prices isn't an anti-trust issue on its own. The company has to be doing it AND they have to have market dominance AND be preventing others from competing somehow. The fact that AMD will happily sell you a GPU for less money is counter to that. They aren't as good, but that's fine. It is legal to charge more money for a better product (or hell even a worse one if you can figure out how to market it).

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Interesting you bring up AMD, because that actually raises another question. Nvidia is the most valuable publicly traded company in the world and one of the biggest suppliers fueling the AI boom. That same AI demand is putting enormous pressure on semiconductor manufacturing and memory supplies, resources AMD also depends on to compete.

So Nvidia is benefiting enormously from an industry expansion that's also making it more expensive and difficult for competitors to bring products to market. Even AMD's GPU prices are climbing. You emphasized that antitrust requires market dominance AND conduct that restricts competition. Fair enough. But when Nvidia already controls roughly 90% of the desktop GPU market, shouldn't we be examining whether its massive capacity commitments and supplier agreements are further limiting competitors' access to those resources?

I'm not claiming that's been established. That's precisely why I'm questioning it. Simply saying consumers can buy AMD doesn't address the competitive pressures AMD or even Intel is facing.

Eshelmen said:

So Nvidia is benefiting enormously from an industry expansion that's also making it more expensive and difficult for competitors to bring products to market. Even AMD's GPU prices are climbing. You emphasized that antitrust requires market dominance AND conduct that restricts competition. Fair enough. But when Nvidia already controls roughly 90% of the desktop GPU market, shouldn't we be examining whether its massive capacity commitments and supplier agreements are further limiting competitors' access to those resources?

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I mean if you think the government is interested in investigating that I assure you they are not, but that aside no, not really as they compete with EVERYONE for those fab resources. nVidia, AMD, Intel, Apple, Qualcomm, Broadcom, Mediatek, etc, etc are all customers competing for fab resources. Many of those are larger than AMD in terms of capacity they buy (for example Qualcomm) and Apple in particularly was a bigger customer until just recently, nVidia is now the top but Apple is still huge.

Again you are going to have a hell of a time claiming nVidia is squeezing AMD out when there are plenty of other customers bidding for the same fab capacity and when AMD is still producing CPUs and GPUs apace.

Eshelmen said:

I'm not claiming that's been established. That's precisely why I'm questioning it. Simply saying consumers can buy AMD doesn't address the competitive pressures AMD itself is facing.

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What pressure? AMD has reported record earnings, same as (most) everyone else in tech. They aren't being squeezed out at this point, they are making more than ever.


Again, this really seems to come down to you don't think you should have to pay so much for GPUs. It's fine to not want to, I don't want to, but the idea that somehow it is illegal for them to charge a lot for them is silly. Financial pressure aside (on both the supply and demand side) they can just flat out raise prices if they like. It's shitty, it isn't illegal.

Sycraft said:

I mean if you think the government is interested in investigating that I assure you they are not, but that aside no, not really as they compete with EVERYONE for those fab resources. nVidia, AMD, Intel, Apple, Qualcomm, Broadcom, Mediatek, etc, etc are all customers competing for fab resources. Many of those are larger than AMD in terms of capacity they buy (for example Qualcomm) and Apple in particularly was a bigger customer until just recently, nVidia is now the top but Apple is still huge.

Again you are going to have a hell of a time claiming nVidia is squeezing AMD out when there are plenty of other customers bidding for the same fab capacity and when AMD is still producing CPUs and GPUs apace.


What pressure? AMD has reported record earnings, same as (most) everyone else in tech. They aren't being squeezed out at this point, they are making more than ever.


Again, this really seems to come down to you don't think you should have to pay so much for GPUs. It's fine to not want to, I don't want to, but the idea that somehow it is illegal for them to charge a lot for them is silly. Financial pressure aside (on both the supply and demand side) they can just flat out raise prices if they like. It's shitty, it isn't illegal.

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Nobody wants to pay obscene prices for GPUs. That's not the point.

And you assure me the government isn't interested? Nvidia's own SEC filings state they've received inquiries from competition regulators in the US, EU, UK, China, and South Korea regarding GPU sales, supply allocations, and agreements with suppliers and partners.
So apparently they are interested. And in the very things I'm questioning.

That's how investigations start. They request information, examine it, and if something raises concerns, they pursue it further.
As for AMD, record earnings don't mean they're immune to supply constraints or competitive pressure. And listing every company competing for fab capacity doesn't tell us what's actually in Nvidia's agreements.

You seem pretty confident there's nothing worth investigating. Meanwhile, government regulators are already asking questions.

Sycraft said:

nVidia has real competition in the form of AMD.

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Debatable. I do agree that they are doing enough for NVIDIA to point towards them and claim they don't have a monopoly on the industry. NVIDIA would technically be correct, which is the best kind of correct, but functionally? It's pretty close to a monopoly in the PC gaming space. Intel's not doing shit, AMD is only 8-10% of the market share, and NVIDIA is pretty much the rest of it. If AMD didn't cut prices to the bone comparatively, there wouldn't be any reason to buy its hardware over NVIDIA's. Sadly, that's good enough to stave off any real anti-trust case against them. We saw this with Intel and Microsoft back in the late 1990's and early 2000's. Intel pointed at AMD and Cyrix even when they sold a fraction of the CPU's it did. Microsoft pointed towards Apple, which at the time had an absolutely pathetic market share.

Even if there is something here, it would likely take years to go anywhere and the fine or fines NVIDIA would have to pay would probably be a write off as the cost of doing business. One of the largest fines ever issued was against Bank of America for around 16 billion dollars. While something like that would seem like a lot, even wiping out all the gaming profits/revenue in a year, how many years of doing business will NVIDIA have had to cover that cost? Meaning, it's probably not going to hit them all that hard all things considered. I'm not saying that investigations shouldn't happen or that its pointless to see what can be done from a legal perspective. I'm just saying we should probably keep our expectations low.

The thing is, beyond relatively high demand and poor availability, NVIDIA isn't the one charging 5,000+ for its GPU's. It's likely charging whatever it always had around launch for them. It's manufacturers and retailers jacking up the prices. It's scalpers trying to get rich quick on getting lucky enough to get cards for MSRP or near it. This problem is due to availability, which is on NVIDIA's shoulders to some degree, but the fact is, it is up to NVIDIA where they want to allocate their silicon once its made. Naturally, they'll choose the market where the margins are the greatest. That's just good business. It sucks that its hurting us, but it is what it is.

Eshelmen said:

Nobody wants to pay obscene prices for GPUs. That's not the point.

And you assure me the government isn't interested? Nvidia's own SEC filings state they've received inquiries from competition regulators in the US, EU, UK, China, and South Korea regarding GPU sales, supply allocations, and agreements with suppliers and partners.
So apparently they are interested. And in the very things I'm questioning.

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In the US? Ya I'm pretty confident they don't care. Corporate investigations have tanked recently. I don't support it, but it is how it is. Other countries? Sure though those don't sound like anti-trust invesitgations.

Eshelmen said:

That's how investigations start. They request information, examine it, and if something raises concerns, they pursue it further.
As for AMD, record earnings don't mean they're immune to supply constraints or competitive pressure. And listing every company competing for fab capacity doesn't tell us what's actually in Nvidia's agreements.

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But what is your point? You don't seem to have any evidence, you are just saying "This should be anti-trust!" but the reason you seem to think that is because their cards are expensive, and they discontinued a consumer card. I'm pointing out why that is something that even if you can establish they are a monopoly, which I don't think can be done, they can do anyhow.

Eshelmen said:

You seem pretty confident there's nothing worth investigating. Meanwhile, government regulators are already asking questions.

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Let me know when they open a case against nVidia. Until then, it doesn't matter. Governments look at things all the time and decide there's nothing happening, or whatever is happening isn't worth pursuing.


I'm not happy about what's going on in the GPU market. However I don't think it is a case where nVidia is going to get slapped around, because what we are seeing is everything going nuts. Same Altman is out buying hardware that hasn't been made with money he doesn't have and he's not the only one. So long as a million "neo clouds" are springing up trying to build datacenters at an irresponsible pace, prices are going to be stupid. nVidia is taking advantage of that, but so is everyone else.

Dan_D said:

Debatable. I do agree that they are doing enough for NVIDIA to point towards them and claim they don't have a monopoly on the industry. NVIDIA would technically be correct, which is the best kind of correct, but functionally? It's pretty close to a monopoly in the PC gaming space. Intel's not doing shit, AMD is only 8-10% of the market share, and NVIDIA is pretty much the rest of it. If AMD didn't cut prices to the bone comparatively, there wouldn't be any reason to buy its hardware over NVIDIA's. Sadly, that's good enough to stave off any real anti-trust case against them. We saw this with Intel and Microsoft back in the late 1990's and early 2000's. Intel pointed at AMD and Cyrix even when they sold a fraction of the CPU's it did. Microsoft pointed towards Apple, which at the time had an absolutely pathetic market share.

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Though I agree they are the massively dominant force, it has to be more than that to be a monopoly. One of the questions is "How hard is it to change to a competitor?" The answer is "trivial." While I don't want an AMD card, because they don't make things as powerful as I like, I also can't deny that I could just pull out my GeForce and drop in a Radeon and get right back to playing every game on my system. The fact that it is that easy, and that Radeons are readily available in all the same places as GeForces, mean that you'd have a hell of a time with anti-trust.

Likewise I don't think courts would necessarily look at console and PC gaming as separate markets. While they are different, they are still all consumer gaming, and they DO compete with each other.

Dan_D said:

The thing is, beyond relatively high demand and poor availability, NVIDIA isn't the one charging 5,000+ for its GPU's. It's likely charging whatever it always had around launch for them. It's manufacturers and retailers jacking up the prices. It's scalpers trying to get rich quick on getting lucky enough to get cards for MSRP or near it. This problem is due to availability, which is on NVIDIA's shoulders to some degree, but the fact is, it is up to NVIDIA where they want to allocate their silicon once its made. Naturally, they'll choose the market where the margins are the greatest. That's just good business. It sucks that its hurting us, but it is what it is.

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This is also true. Markups are happening at every step of the way. Yes, nVidia is charging more, but part of the reason they are charging more is because they are being charged more. TSMC raised their prices, and memory companies did as well. It literally costs them more to build the cards than it used to. Of course they are cashing in, they didn't raise their prices by what it cost, they are raising them by more and making a greater profit. However the same is then happening with AIBs and retailers. nVidia has raised the price on them, but they are further raising the prices on consumers, and more than nVidia raised on them because they can. Then scalpers are buying up the stock and FURTHER raising the prices.

Makes a perfect shit-storm of high prices.

There could be, but

) High price, that help competition, in no way hurt it and a lot
) Low volume and removing the 5090, that help the competiion, in no way hurt it and a lot, they can if they want stop making 5090 for the only reason to help sales and price of a new 5080 24GB, that would be fine.

What can be legal but would have more scrutiny would be supply chain deal, distribution/resale deal that put as condition to not do business with competitors, buying all ram because you need ram that fine of course, but being a giant buyer that put as a condition cannot sales any to AMD if you want our business or say to Asus/MSI/Gigabytes you cannot make AMD gpus if you want to make Nvidia gpu or best buy you get Founder Edition exclusivity in US distribution if you do not carry AMD gpus would be more the kinds of things.

Eshelmen said:

And you assure me the government isn't interested? Nvidia's own SEC filings state they've received inquiries from competition regulators in the US, EU, UK, China, and South Korea regarding GPU sales, supply allocations, and agreements with suppliers and partners.

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That probably more in the sector they care more about, the AI one than gaming (where you can just easily go in a store, buy an PS5 with an AMD gpu and play games perfectly fine or an AMD gpu and play pc games perfectly fine for the moment), they are quite vertically integrated (at least offer complete solution in that field), it would be easy for offering complete solution to slip into if you want Rubin GPU you must use them and buy the networking-cpu-memory around them from us, we only sales them via complete rack, play favorite with cloud providers that accept exclusive and lock long term contract (which can be fine by itself, but when you become that big can stop to be). Networking-memory is becoming kind of bigger than GPUs in those system in some ways, force bundle of those part could be seen as an issue.

Same for hbm deals... and of course CUDA side of things would be its own software side investigation and government pressure about it.

lol

antitrust ... good luck...

If your super PAC donor dollars do not exceed Nvidia's..

Leather Jacket Ogre is right next to Elmo in cozying up to current admin so nothing is going to happen for a while, and by the time things change, the market may have moved again (they are literally paying 10% of export profits to the admin)

He also lost his marbles arguing AI means kids shouldn't learn long division or calculus and the path to AI safety is more AI....not sure what motivates these folks besides ego, after the big B, money is just a number.