Nvidia RTX 50 series cards are going for as much as 41% more in Japan than on Amazon in the US right now.
A Redditor on r/pcmasterrace posted a photo of Japanese retail pricing for RTX 50 series cards, and a comparison against Amazon US listings turned up some ugly numbers. Using the current JPY 153.38-to-USD exchange rate, the RTX 5060 Ti 8GB shows the worst gap at 41.1% above its US pre-tax price, while the RTX 5080 fares best with a 12.71% average markup. Factor in an 8.5% US sales tax rate and the gaps shrink but don't disappear, ranging from 3.88% to 30.04%. Notably, the photo doesn't include the RTX 5090 at all, suggesting Japanese retailers may already be out of stock.
That absence lines up with a memory chip shortage and surging AI data center demand, both of which have been squeezing GPU supply. Nvidia is reportedly planning to stop building RTX 5090s altogether in favor of AI and professional cards, and third-party sellers are already asking close to $10,000 for one. Japan has a track record of catching supply problems first: shops there started rationing SSDs, HDDs, RAM, and higher-capacity GPUs late last year before those shortages became a wider story.
Japan's GPU prices usually run a bit hotter than the US baseline anyway, so some of this markup is business as usual. But a 41% jump on a mainstream card like the RTX 5060 Ti isn't typical import-tax noise - it looks like an early tremor from a supply chain under real strain.