Maybe this “leak” is intentional so they can judge the reaction to the proposed price.
Testing the water... how warm/hot it will become, after the public seeing this sh*t, and how much they (AMD and nVidia) can get away with.
The attention is simply focused elsewhere. Exiting? Nah. The AI boom will not keep booming. At some point, things will stabilize and both companies will want every market they can push GPUs on... like they historically always have. AI, crypto, gaming, supercomputers, servers... There's just one new kid on the block, the others, gaming has survived just fine.
It baffles me how people seem to have the perspective of 'near future' and nothing else. Do we really think AI is going to keep gobbling up all the chips? Come on. I mean look at AMD. They've had long term planning going on. That's why they have such trouble to adjust to a new reality, too. But really, these companies just sell chips and they make the chips the market wants. Its that simple. Gaming ain't going nowhere. The demand will remain. The supply will be there. If you haven't noticed yet... gaming is too big to fail. We want it. More of it. Year over year - irrespective of the economical trends.
Another good example: look at Intel. They're forging ahead on GPU and releasing gaming GPUs to do so. They don't do that just to make AI powerhouses, heck we're seeing that appear alongside their CPU business more so than being a pure GPU development. The technology is simply becoming impossible not to have, and gaming will always remain one of the things to do with it.
Doubt they will go away from the Gaming market. At least AMD is about to make UDNA, to do the same as they did with EPYC/Ryzen, but this time with Enterpize/Radeon. They both need to "Gamer" GPU division, to substitute/sell the AI stuff with inferior silicon, which otherwise wouldn't sell as the Enterprize/Datacenter HW. And also, to cover the wider (the entire spectre of) AI audience, targeting thise, who aren't going to buy loads/bulk of multi-thousand-bucks Quadro/Tesla WS/ML of business/professional GPUs.
Something tells me, the GPU makers themselves, or via AIB proxy, are going to milk as much as they can, and will tryto keep the real/street prices, as high as possible, for as long possible. Simultaneously, trying to "pursuade", "talk" people into the narratives, of "these prices are actually this great", through YT, and "journaists"
It would be incredibly great, if intel would finally manage to sort their sh*t out, and start to flood the market with affordable, reliable GPUs, on both HW and SW levels. Of they'll manage to get their own foundries work for their GPU silicon, with good yields, it would further bring down the prices, or at least will keep them nice. It would be also great, if Intel this time will keep things humble, and sane, thus undercutting it's both duopolist GPU rivals. But this is still Intel we are talking about. So I don't hold my breath. At this point the market need not only third, but fourth and fifths GPU rivals. The more the better.