Overview
- A buyer who placed a paid order for an ASUS ROG Astral RTX 5090 through Nvidia’s marketplace was refunded after the vendor canceled the order and would not honor the listed price.
- Nvidia told the customer that ASUS provided a price change update “a little late” and that Nvidia asked ASUS to honor the original order but ASUS was unable to fulfil it at the previous rate.
- After the cancellation the same ASUS card was relisted roughly $500 higher, increasing the buyer’s out‑of‑pocket cost to about $5,090 after tax if they chose to repurchase.
- The episode exposes a coordination failure between a marketplace operator and a board partner that left the purchaser without the product despite paying in full.
- The case reflects a wider industry trend of steep third‑party GPU markups well above the $1,999 RTX 5090 Founders Edition MSRP as rising memory costs and AI demand push vendors and retailers to raise prices and, in some cases, cancel or adjust orders.