fair, and honestly a fair correction on the causal claim, I showed that consolidation exists and that a price gap exists, but I didn’t actually isolate consolidation as THE cause versus other factors (retailer density generally, market size, logistics, etc). Given how many other stores exist like you said, it’s likely one factor among several, not necessarily the main driver. should have been more careful with that framing rather than implying a direct causal link I can’t actually prove with this data. good catch.

from what I’ve tracked, it lines up with the broader chip shortage story, component costs have gone up across the GPU supply chain. on top of that, the RTX 5090 specifically has extra demand from people running local AI models since it’s the best consumer card with 32GB VRAM, so it’s pulling on both gamers and AI/compute users at once.