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I absolutely loathe Nvidia at this point. They've completely abandoned the core consumer that built Jensen's empire. Why not offer pre-orders of 5090s and MSRP? Why has every single drop at Best Buy gone primarily to botters and scalpers? Why not give end users half a fighting chance like EVGA used to by letting end users get in line before Nvidia crushed them?

When the AI bubble bursts, Nvidia is going to be Enron.

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> Why not offer pre-orders of 5090s and MSRP?

AI bots (probably powered by NVIDIA chips) would gobble those up in seconds.

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> Why not offer pre-orders of 5090s and MSRP?

Because it would immediately go to scalpers anyway. Like, say the 5090 - I'm seeing prices of almost 7000€ for that thing [1]. Assuming without AI it would be priced at 1500€ - I could make about 3 months of rent just by immediately selling the GPU to the next reseller who then peddles it to some AI training farm. And in this economy, oh hell yes I would.

> When the AI bubble bursts, Nvidia is going to be Enron.

Nah. NVIDIA was a money printer way before AI was a thing. Post-collapse they will still be a money printer, just at lower speed.

The ones who are going to get fucked over hard when the AI bubble pops is pensioners, the generation who is just entering the workforce (2007ff had an aftereffect in wage depression lasting for up to a decade), and everyone who took up investments to service the AI demand (utilities, construction companies and the likes).

[1] https://www.pccomponentes.de/msi-geforce-rtx-5090-ventus-3x-...

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>> Because it would immediately go to scalpers anyway.

No they wouldn't, tens of thousands of unique users would be in line with dozens or hundreds of scalpers, if they're all allowed to buy one every 180 days per payment method, the end users actually get a fighting chance. Today they have no chance.

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Scalpers use other people to purchase high demand items to then scalp.

There is enough profit to pay people to buy stuff and resell it.

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And it's not just a few people. The sophisticated scalping operations have hundreds of straw buyers in their network. For items that generate far less profit than a 5090 currently does.

I've watched vans dropping of an endless stream of people in the parking lot of my local Costco to buy out all the cases of Pokemon cards within 20 minutes of the "random" drop they put on the floor. They go in, buy the max quantity of the item with cash provided by their keeper, bring it back to the van with a receipt and change, and get the $20-30 per item pay they were promised. There were 2 or 3 'legit' buyers out of hundreds of obvious straw buyers.

If the profit per item is $4-5k, expect this to go into turbo mode and be done in a marketplace/automated fashion and go viral. Just sign up to your favorite scalper's platform, submit your information, get a quote and a prepaid label and drop the box you got from nVidia off at USPS the next day. That "tens of thousands" of individuals will turn into "millions" really quick once it gets known there is rent money involved by clicking a few buttons and it goes viral on all the social media platforms.

The only way out from that is manufacturer enough cards to meet demand, and at that point the retail channel doesn't really matter.

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Everyone I know who signed up for EVGA cards for the 30 series got one eventually, even if it took a couple months of waiting. I don't know anyone with a 5090 FE at MSRP.
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Yeah, I will never buy an Nvidia GPU again. I assume many of their former customers feel the same way. When the bubble pops, I think Nvidia is going to feel the pain as they will have pushed many of their former customers into the arms of AMD.
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