Recently, we covered a rumor arising from PCGH which stated that the RTX 5090, and perhaps even the RTX 5080, are gearing up to face an extremely stock-limited launch in Germany. Now, it appears that customers in North America will likely face very similar circumstances, if the claims made by tipster Moore's Law is Dead's sources are taken to be true. MLID spoke with several sources, including distributors and AIBs, all of whom had the same thing to say - it is going be quite hard to snag an RTX 5090 or RTX 5080 at launch.

One of the distributors that MLID apparently spoke with, went as far as to comment that they simply won't be having any RTX 5090s at all in the first month of launch. Further, while they received almost 200 RTX 4080s during the previous launch season, they only expect to get 20 units of the RTX 5080 this time around. As for the RTX 5090, they do not foresee inventory before late Q1, or even Q2 of this year. A second source, who claimed to be from an AIB partner, stated that while they will have RTX 5080s ready at launch, they are "only a fraction" of the RTX 4080s they had last time. Moreover, the number of RTX 5090s they claim to have matches that of the RTX 3090s they had, which, for those who don't remember, suffered from severe supply shortages at launch.Another source in the EU claimed something along the same lines, and a source from NVIDIA revealed that they have already been warned that the stocks in the NVIDIA Employee Store will be very limited, unlike the RTX 4090s, which were easily available at the employee store at launch. Clearly, as mentioned previously, scoring a RTX 5090 at launch might turn out to be even more difficult than previously thought, despite the supply chain having mostly recovered. The reason behind the limited supply of RTX 50-series GPUs is not clear, but it might be fair to state that NVIDIA is bottlenecking supply to handle scalpers. That said, how launch availability for the RTX 5090 and 5080 plays out in real life, remains to be seen.