An Nvidia RTX 5090 graphics card. | Photo by Tom Warren/The Verge
Every so often, Central Computers - one of the last remaining dedicated Silicon Valley computer stores - lets subscribers know it's managed to obtain a small shipment of AMD graphics cards. Today, it informed me that I could now purchase a $600 Radeon RX 9070 XT for $850 - a $250 markup.
It's not alone. I just checked every major US retailer and street prices on eBay, and I regret to inform you: the great GPU shortage has returned. Many AMD cards are being marked up $100, $200, $250, even $280. The street price of an Nvidia RTX 5080 is now over $1,500, a full $500 higher than MSRP. And an RTX 5090, the most powerful consumer GPU? You can't even get the $2,000 card for $3,000 today.
Here, I've built tables to show you:
Item
MSRP
Average eBay street price (Mar-Apr)
Best retail price (April 25th)
AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT
$599
$957
$880
AMD Radeon RX 9070
$549
$761
$835
Nvidia RTX 5090
$1,999
$3,871
$3,140
Nvidia RTX 5080
$999
$1,533
$1,390
Nvidia RTX 5070 Ti
$749
$1,052
$825
Nvidia RTX 5070
$549
$715
$610
"Best retail price" is the actual price I saw a card for on April 25th - roughly the minimum you'd pay.
Despite some controversy leading up to its release, Assassin’s Creed Shadows managed to rise to the top of March sales charts in the U.S., according to industry-tracking firm Circana. It was one of several releases that month to make it onto the charts, with Shadows also becoming the second-best-selling game of the year. However, sales in gen…Read More
Welcome to Edition 7.41 of the Rocket Report! NASA and its contractors at Kennedy Space Center in Florida continue building a new mobile launch tower for the Space Launch System Block 1B rocket, a taller, upgraded version of the SLS rocket being used for the agency's initial Artemis lunar missions. Workers stacked another segment of the tower a couple of weeks ago, and the structure is inching closer to its full height of 355 feet (108 meters). But this is just the start. Once the tower is fully assembled, it must be outfitted with miles of cabling, tubing, and piping and then be tested before it can support an SLS launch campaign. Last year, NASA's inspector general projected the tower won't be ready for a launch until the spring of 2029, and its costs could reach $2.7 billion. The good news, if you can call it that, is that there probably won't be an SLS Block 1B rocket that needs to use it in 2029, whether it's due to delays or cancellation.
As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Fresh details on Astra's strategic pivot. Astra, the once high-flying rocket startup that crashed back to Earth with investors before going private last year, has unveiled new details about its $44 million contract with the Department of Defense, Space News reports. The DOD contract announced last year supports the development of Rocket 4, a two-stage, mobile launch vehicle with ambitions to deliver cargo across the globe in under an hour. While Astra's ill-fated Rocket 3 focused on launching small satellites into low-Earth orbit, Astra wants to make Rocket 4 a military utility vehicle. Rocket 4 will still be able to loft conventional satellites, but Astra's most lucrative contract for the new launch vehicle involves using the rocket for precise point-to-point delivery of up to 1,300 pounds (590 kilograms) of supplies from orbit via specialized reentry vehicles. The military has shown interest in developing a rocket-based rapid global cargo delivery system for several years, and it has a contract with SpaceX to study how the much larger Starship rocket could do a similar job.
Welcome to Edition 7.39 of the Rocket Report! Not getting your launch fix? Buckle up. We're on the cusp of a boom in rocket launches as three new megaconstellations have either just begun or will soon begin deploying thousands of satellites to enable broadband connectivity from space. If the megaconstellations come to fruition, this will require more than a thousand launches in the next few years, on top of SpaceX's blistering Starlink launch cadence. We discuss the topic of megaconstellations in this week's Rocket Report.
As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
So, what is SpinLaunch doing now? Ars Technica has mentioned SpinLaunch, the company that literally wants to yeet satellites into space, in previous Rocket Report newsletters. This company enjoyed some success in raising money for its so-crazy-it-just-might-work idea of catapulting rockets and satellites into the sky, a concept SpinLaunch calls "kinetic launch." But SpinLaunch is now making a hard pivot to small satellites, a move that, on its face, seems puzzling after going all-in on kinetic launch and even performing several impressive hardware tests, throwing a projectile to altitudes of up to 30,000 feet. Ars got the scoop, with the company's CEO detailing why and how it plans to build a low-Earth orbit telecommunications constellation with 280 satellites.
An unreleased version of Waymo’s privacy policy suggests the California-based company is preparing to use data from its robotaxis, including interior cameras, to train generative AI models and to offer targeted ads.
In echoes of Minority Report, the British government is working on a “murder prediction” tool aimed at identifying individuals who are most likely to become killers, the Guardian reported this week. The project — originally called the “homicide prediction project” but since renamed as “sharing data to improve risk assessment” — is being run by […]
Kevin Bates managed to quit his day job and move to China after his game-playing business card, the Arduboy, went viral in 2014. But a decade later, Trump’s staggering and inexplicable new US tariffs are driving him out of business.
Just as he was about to turn a profit for the first time, just before he was about to bring a new product to retail, he tells The Verge that his company can no longer survive as-is. He says that despite lifetime Arduboy sales of over $1 million, much of it from recent growth in 2023 and 2024, Trump’s new 104 percent China tariffs will be the beginning of the end.
“I just like making circuit boards and helping people learn to code games. This is all too much,” he says.
Even if he wanted to — Bates admits he’s been looking to sunset Arduboy for a while — he says he wouldn’t be able to satisfy Trump’s stated goal of restarting manufacturing in the US.
“There are no manufacturers in the USA who would even answer an email to produce Arduboy, much less give a good price. I could build them myself and end up making about $10 an hour, still paying a crazy amount for components.”
Instead, he says, his options are to dramatically raise prices, find a way around the tariffs, or simply kill off Arduboy for good.
“The fact Arduboy could exist at all was kind of a miracle of global trade. An individual person, producing and distributing an international product with margins that would never work at a larger company. I didn’t need 80 percent markup to survive,” he says, adding that his actual margins ranged from 30 to 50 percent.
Trump’s US tariffs would entirely wipe out those margins, and he says China’s retaliatory tariffs would hurt too, as they would impose a 34 percent tariff on the Arduboy’s US-made processor, which Bates says is the most expensive component in the system.
While he’s hopeful that some larger organization might buy Arduboy and take up the torch, he admits that’s not terribly realistic in this economic climate, and he’s already declaring Arduboy “dead” on his LinkedIn and in the Arduboy forums. He’s already looking for a new day job once again.
But he says Arduboy isn’t quite dead yet. He wants to launch one last Kickstarter for a USB-C version of the Arduboy with “more features like real time clock, IR blaster, and link cable support,” assuming he can figure out how to ship them at a price people will pay. He says he already saw $99 Arduboy FX Special Edition as overpriced for what it is, and he isn’t looking forward to charging $200 for a new version or saddling buyers with customs fees should he choose to drop-ship them.
“The only realistic solution is to warehouse the inventory somewhere that doesn’t have Chinese import taxes, and drop ship everything. I visited my factory last year to talk about this, and they said all their customers are in the same situation so they said they would have a solution. But one has not materialized yet,” he says.
Speaking of drop-shipping and customs fees, that is probably what you should expect if you buy the new banana-shaped Arduboy or the last few remaining units of the Arduboy FX Special Edition. “I am planning to fulfill the orders but they may be drop shipped, so U.S. customers should be aware that import taxes may now apply,” he tells The Verge. But he also may just turn off Banana-Bit preorders, as he says he’s only sold about a dozen so far.
He also warns these packages could get held up at US customs for a time, because Trump has also gotten rid of the de minimis exemption that let low-value packages enter the US duty-free. “That’s going to impact everything from Shein to Temu to AliExpress, and honestly, it’s going to be chaos. U.S. customs isn’t ready for that volume,” he says.
Bates says Trump’s trade war is “an absolute unmitigated disaster for anyone without the ability to dramatically restructure.”
Welcome to Edition 7.38 of the Rocket Report! SpaceX test fired a Super Heavy booster that launched in January on Thursday, in South Texas. This sets up the possibility of a reused Super Heavy rocket launching within the next several weeks, and would be an important step forward in the Starship launch program. It's also a bold step given that there is a lot riding on this Starship launch, given that the last two have failed due to propulsion issues with the rocket's upper stage.
As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
European commercial launch industry joins the space race. The first flight of Isar Aerospace's Spectrum rocket didn't last long on Sunday, Ars reports. The booster's nine engines switched off as the rocket cartwheeled upside-down and fell a short distance from its Arctic launch pad in Norway, ending the abbreviated test flight with a spectacular, fiery crash into the sea. However, it marked the beginning of something new in Europe as commercial startups begin launching rockets.
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