In short: China is in a frenzy to get its palms on the Nvidia RTX 5090 graphics card – however not simply because individuals are determined for extra FPS of their video games. The demand is the results of DeepSeek’s AI fashions, which firms understand they will run on Nvidia’s client GPUs at a fraction of what it might value them to purchase AI accelerators.
DeepSeek’s industry-disrupting R1 fashions can effectively run on client GPUs, quite than costly AI accelerators such because the H20. As reported by The Data (paywalled article), the scenario has led to demand for the China-specific RTX 5090D reaching some extent the place the playing cards are being bought on the black marketplace for as much as $5,000. And even at that worth, the probabilities of discovering one are fairly slim.
It is not simply China the place the RTX 5090 and 5090D are being purchased for greater than 100% of their $2,000 MSRP. eBay.com has a number of listings for the playing cards ranging between $5,000 and $10,000, a lot of that are actaully shipped from China. There are additionally quite a lot of models from US sellers priced between $2,500 and $5,000.
Given the low to non-existent inventory ranges and the large demand for the flagship, shopping for an RTX 5090, or any Blackwell card, straight from a retailer proper now’s like making an attempt to buy a card in the course of the peak of the pandemic/crypto-boom disaster in 2020 and 2021.
Whereas DeepSeek’s R1 with its 671 billion parameters is designed for high-performance environments, the corporate has developed distilled variations of the mannequin which might be extra accessible for client {hardware}. The 8 billion parameter Llama 8B, for instance, recommends a GPU with 21GB of VRAM.
Final month, Nvidia and AMD have been embroiled in a public argument over which of their respective client graphics playing cards provided higher efficiency when operating DeepSeek’s AI fashions. Workforce Crimson claimed the 7900 XTX outperformed the RTX 4090, prompting Workforce Inexperienced to launch benchmarks exhibiting each the 4090 and RTX 5090 are sooner – measured with llama-bench – than AMD’s card when utilizing Distill Qwen 7B, Llama 8B, and Qwen 32B.
