Newegg Blames Tariffs For Skyrocking GeForce RTX 5090 And 5080 GPU Prices
You may have noticed that NVIDIA's newest graphics cards, the GeForce RTX 5090 and GeForce RTX 5080, are nearly impossible to find in stock. In the wake of what looks like a severe shortage (which has people dubbing this a paper launch), you may have also noticed that NVIDIA's hardware partners have issued a round of price hikes. What gives? If you ask Newegg, tariffs are to blame.
Just like Best Buy, Micro Center, and every other retailer, Newegg sold out of its initial inventory of GeForce RTX 5090 and 5080 GPUs almost immediately. Then days later, Newegg announced a restock event on X/Twitter, and predictably, however many GPUs it had available sold out right away too.
While this was happening, it was discovered that some of NVIDIA's hardware partners had jacked up the price on custom models after the initial launch. ASUS and MSI, for example, raised the price of GeForce RTX 5090 and 5080 GPUs in their own webstores, which also resulted in price increases at Newegg.
When asked about this on X/Twitter, Newegg put the blame squarely on tariffs.
In response to Newegg posting about its restock event, someone asked, "Did the pricing go up on 5080s?" Newegg's official account confirmed that it did, saying, "Yeah, tariffs."
Further down the thread, someone posted a follow-up question asking, "Aren't these GPUs coming from Taiwan and Vietnam also where there are no tariffs?" Newegg replied, "Our GPUs are from China."
And indeed, prices have gone up. For example, the ASUS Prime GeForce RTX 5080 is currently listed for $1,264.99 (out of stock, naturally). But according to PCPartPicker's price tracking, the same card initially sold for $999.99. So in a matter of days, this particular model has gone up 26.5%.
Here are a few more examples, as found on PCPartPicker...
- Gigabyte Windforce OC SFF GeForce RTX 5080: $1,269.99 vs $999.99 at launch (up 27%)
- Zotac Gaming Solid OC GeForce RTX 5080: $1,269.99 vs $1,149.99 (up 10.4%)
- MSI Suprim Liquid SOC GeForce RTX 5080: $1,529.99 vs $1,329.99 (up 15%)
And here are some examples of price hikes on GeForce RTX 5090 models...
Newegg's response on X/Twitter is referring to recent tariffs imposed by the Trump administration. While Trump has put a delay on 25% tariffs for goods imported from Canada and Mexico, he didn't walk back a 10% tariff on Chinese imports. Since then, we've seen GPU prices increase by several hundred dollars, depending on the model. Some of the price hikes versus MSRP exceed 10%, though, which raises the question of how big a role they're actually playing, versus price gouging and plain old fashioned greed.
Newegg's drawn considerable attention, as it's a major online retailer caught in the crosshairs of a GPU shortage and economic policies. It's also inviting scrutiny with questionable restock strategies—it recently sent out an email to select customers telling them to sign in to their account to see they've been chosen to have a GeForce RTX 50 series GPU plopped into their shopping cart—and, in addition to price increases that exceed 10%, some wild GPU bundles. Bundles are nothing new, but there are several GeForce RTX 5090 bundle listings on Newegg that are priced above $6,000 (as shown in the screenshot above), which is bonkers.
To be fair, it's not just Newegg that's pointing a finger at tariffs. ASRock told PCMag that it is shifting its manufacturing to deal with the tariffs.
"As for the 10% tariff applied to other products like GPU cards, we need some time to transfer the manufacturing to other countries," ASRock said.
ASRock also said that this process could take years, and in the meantime, "we may absorb some of the cost and also increase some in price to reflect the increased cost."
