If you want Nvidia's flagship RTX 5090 graphics card in Taiwan right now, you may have to buy a small pile of other hardware to get it.
According to Tom's Hardware, the Taiwanese ecommerce platform PChome24h has been listing RTX 5090 cards inside bundles that pair the GPU with what the outlet describes as "a crazy number of motherboards" — in one case eight of them — along with entry-to-mid-range graphics cards and several other components.
The practice is simple in economics if strange in appearance. Demand for the top-end card outstrips supply, so instead of raising the sticker price on the GPU itself, a seller attaches it to slower-moving inventory. The customer who desperately wants the 5090 ends up funding the clearance of parts they never wanted. Tom's Hardware frames this bluntly, saying retailers are holding GPUs "hostage."
The comparison the publication reaches for is the cryptocurrency mining boom, when surging demand from miners made consumer graphics cards scarce and expensive, and retailers leaned on bundling and markups to ration what stock they had. Tom's Hardware calls the combos "alarming" and reads them as a signal about the direction the PC building industry is headed.
One retailer in one market is not a global trend, and the source material does not establish how widespread the practice is or what the bundles cost. But it is a familiar early symptom.
Why it matters: bundling is how scarcity gets passed to buyers without ever showing up as a price increase, and for anyone building a PC it means the real cost of a high-end GPU can be far higher than the number on the box.