Dospara’s Akihabara main store cut the Palit GeForce RTX 5090 GameRock from ¥1,288,000 to ¥999,800 this week, ITmedia reports, while ASUS JAPAN repriced its RTX 5090 cards above ¥1.5 million. All prices in this article are in yen.
Wccftech’s report on the cuts, published on 14 November, ran them alongside Jensen Huang’s resignation as NVIDIA’s chief executive and says it found no direct link. ITmedia and the Japanese hardware site Gazlog, the two outlets Wccftech cites, don’t tie the cuts to the resignation either.
What ITmedia saw in Akihabara
ITmedia’s Yusuke Furuta walked Akihabara’s PC-parts shops for the outlet’s weekly report, published at 6am Japan time on 14 November (10am in New Zealand). Dospara’s Akihabara main store restocked the Palit RTX 5090 GameRock the week before at ¥1,288,000 and now lists it at ¥999,800. The MSI GeForce RTX 5090 32G VENTUS 3X OC, which sold at the same price, is down to ¥1,048,000, a cut of more than ¥200,000.
A Dospara staffer told ITmedia the store still has a fair amount of stock. ITmedia photographed the price list on the evening of 13 November and says the cut doesn’t look like a time-limited special.
ASUS JAPAN moved the other way. The ROG Astral GeForce RTX 5090 32GB GDDR7 OC Edition sold for about ¥1.1 million the week before and now goes for more than ¥1.5 million, ITmedia says, and several other ASUS lines are above that mark. TSUKUMO eX. told ITmedia that for other makers’ cards, anything under ¥1.2 million counts as cheap. Other shops had sold out, and ITmedia says arrivals are irregular.
ITmedia found cards with the same GPU on sale at the same time more than ¥500,000 apart, and says it couldn’t establish why the makers and distributors priced them that way.
What Gazlog’s price tracking shows
Gazlog tracks retail prices across Japan. It says the cheapest RTX 5080 16GB rose from ¥267,700 on 13 October to ¥345,000 on 31 October after reports that the 16GB model was ending production, while the number of stores with stock fell from nine to three. On 13 November Dospara listed it at ¥299,800, about ¥45,000 (13%) below the peak, and eight stores have stock again. That’s still about ¥32,000 above the 13 October price.
The average of each store’s lowest RTX 5080 price fell from about ¥366,000 to about ¥344,000, so the cuts reach beyond Dospara. Gazlog’s reading is that sales slowed above ¥300,000 and stores holding stock cut prices.
Gazlog’s RTX 5090 numbers start on 3 November, when stock returned at about ¥1.29 million; no Japanese store had stock after the end of September. By 14 November Dospara’s lowest price was about ¥1.05 million (Gazlog lists its Palit GameRock at ¥1,048,000) and four stores had stock. The average of each store’s lowest price fell only about ¥60,000 over the same period, which Gazlog reads as cuts at some stores, not across the market.
| Card | Earlier | Now |
|---|---|---|
| RTX 5090 Palit GameRock, Dospara Akihabara | ¥1,288,000 | ¥999,800 |
| RTX 5090 MSI VENTUS 3X OC, Dospara Akihabara | ¥1,288,000 | ¥1,048,000 |
| RTX 5090 ASUS ROG Astral OC Edition | about ¥1,100,000 | over ¥1,500,000 |
| RTX 5090, lowest price with stock in Japan | about ¥1,290,000 (3 Nov) | ¥1,048,000 (14 Nov) |
| RTX 5080 16GB, lowest price in Japan | ¥345,000 (31 Oct) | ¥299,800 (13 Nov) |
Gazlog also found that every pre-built PC with an RTX 5090 now costs more than 20% above the same parts bought separately. Dospara’s Galleria XDR7A-R59-GD, with a Ryzen 7 9800X3D and 32GB of memory, is ¥1,619,980 after a ¥220,000 rise, about ¥276,000 above the self-build price.
Where the resignation fits
NVIDIA’s board accepted Huang’s resignation on 11 November and announced it on 12 November. Gazlog’s RTX 5080 peak was on 31 October and the RTX 5090 restock on 3 November, both before the announcement. A veteran employee at one Akihabara shop told ITmedia the mood on the sales floor is calm, that any change would come later, and that people are taking the news in stride. ITmedia says products and sales showed almost no change.
What Gazlog expects next
Gazlog expects RTX 5090 prices to stay above ¥1 million. It cites an earlier report built on the German overclocker der8auer’s interviews with board-partner staff, which says partners can’t currently order the GB202 chip and 32GB of GDDR7 memory for the card and that production ends with January to March 2027 volumes. Gazlog says NVIDIA is giving the same chip to the RTX PRO 5500, a professional card, first.
NVIDIA’s public position is the one Jeff Fisher, a senior vice president, gave in Taipei on 16 October: the RTX 5090 isn’t discontinued and will keep shipping, though supply is constrained. Gazlog says NVIDIA’s German arm told der8auer the statement still stands.
For the RTX 5080, Gazlog says a November rise in distributor shipping prices, which it ties to higher memory costs, will reach shelves towards December, so it doesn’t expect the lowest price to return to October’s level.
Discover more from Sulat AI & Tech News
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
