DeepSeek Spurs Crazy Black Market Prices For NVIDIA RTX 50 GPUs in China
The general scarcity of NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 50 series has created a market where GPUs are selling for insane prices at places like eBay. That's not the only thing driving up the cost, though. Over in China, smugglers are making some serious bank by selling illicit GeForce RTX 5090 graphics cards at highly inflated prices, spurred in large part by demand to feed DeepSeek's R1 AI model.
Unveiled two months ago, China's DeepSeek R1 is a fully multi-modal AI that, in some instances, can rival OpenAI's GPT-o1 or its earlier V3 model. It was reportedly built on a comparatively small $6 million budget, and it's also notable for being open source, which means anyone with enough savvy can download and run DeepSeek's models locally.
There are some security concerns linked to DeepSeek, and the exposure of sensitive user data to the web by DeepSeek's mobile app, which occurred in January, was not a good look. Still, there's enough upside (plus the general craze for anything and everything AI these days) to prevent DeepSeek's models from disappearing anytime soon.
Here's where things get interesting. US sanctions have essentially banned GeForce RTX 5090 shipments to China. Instead, the Chinese market has access to a cut-down GeForce RTX 5090D variant. It features the same number of CUDA cores (21,760) and VRAM (32GB GDDR7 on a 512-bit bus), but slashes AI TOPS (trillions of operations per second) performance from 3,352 to 2,375.
According to a paywalled report by The Information that was viewed by WCCFTech, local smugglers in the region are hawking unmolested GeForce RTX 5090 cards in the black market for prices as high as $5,000. Bear in mind that the baseline MSRP for a GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition is $1,999.
Even with the markup, getting access to Blackwell in full RTX 5090 form without the gimped AI TOPS of the RTX 5090D can be much cheaper than buying dedicated AI chips. We also have to imagine that gamers are driving some of the demand in the China.
That's certainly the case in the US. A quick peek at completed auctions on eBay show that GeForce RTX 5090 cards are generally selling the neighborhood of $4,000, give or take a few hundred bucks. Sometimes they sell for much more, depending on the model. For example, this MSI GeForce RTX 5090 Suprim Liquid SOC sold for $6,099, plus another $50 for shipping.
Parsing eBay auctions can be tricky because buyers will sometimes win an auction with no intention of paying, in an effort to deter scalpers. In this case, though, the seller's feedback history suggests that buyers really are ponying up insane prices for NVIDIA's top gaming GPU.
