Local AI GPU Prices are Spiking (Buy Now or Wait?)

0:00 I just launched a new feature on the website at digitalspaceport.com. This is the fourth year I've been paying a lot of attention to GPU prices and I'm already seeing the trend that I see

0:12 every September, October leading up to mid December. And I outlined a bunch of assumptions in a paper. I incorporated a ton of observations that I've made on the channel and I incorporated recent

0:24 data to give you guys some really good pricing intelligence around GPUs and my predictions and my Buzzobots predictions around what we think is going to probably happen over the next couple of

0:36 months as far as GPU prices, especially given the fact that we're still in the midst of our insane memory crisis. So looking at some of the methodology, you can take a chance to read through all of

0:46 this, but there's some really interesting things in here that I've seen in the past week that have really broken out. And some of those are unfortunately things like 5090s this

0:56 week up $575. Continuing a price trend that goes up and up. This is consistent year over year with what I've seen with top end around this time frame leading up until

1:06 right around the December time frame accelerating in price. There's good news here though also. So, you definitely want to if you're planning on things, factor some of that in. Also, as well,

1:16 on the flip side, we've got some interesting options also that have come down. Like the 5060 Ti is now $50 cheaper. Not to say that that that is a huge price move, but looking at the

1:26 bands, that's at least a positive correlation in the right direction. It needs to still come down more. And we've got DGX Sparks just recently, I think it was Friday, they actually sold out at

1:35 MicroEnter very briefly. There's a very thin restock that's going on right now and there's only I think three locations that have one or two in each of those locations. This is at

1:46 digitalspaceport.com and if you go to the local AI tab, you can find it or you can just type in GPU price analysis and it'll link you over here to this sheet. And so this report I'm going to run at

1:58 the end of the month because I think it will give us a good looking forward point to see and it'll give me a good refining feedback loop that I can feed back into my model to say whether or not

2:08 we think these prices and these predictions are actually getting better and hopefully we can refine this down and get a really good predictive model over time as far as what the price

2:16 trends look like here. But definitely there are extenduating external factors that you would have to think that could impact at any time. Like if the price of just the base services out there go up

2:27 substantially, you could see an inflow of new people looking for how can I get started in local AI. That could dramatically change the landscape especially with pricing considerations

2:37 probably happening in 2027 and and large numbers for price needs to go up for both Anthropic and Open AAI. If you're looking for real time pricing, that you can always find over on the prices and

2:50 spec sheet. That one updated frequently, several times a day. But if you're looking for predictions, analysis, and a forward-looking kind of statement that looks at what I think are going to be

3:01 the trend lines and what Budo thinks are going to be the trend lines, then these will be produced at the end of the month and try to look for a period of time, possibly even multiple years as far as

3:11 what we think is going to happen. So, some other things that I thought, you know, I wanted to highlight out here was the outside of range things. That includes the ARC B7032, which $175 plus

3:23 in the past 2 days. And of course, the 5090, like I mentioned, plus 175 in the past 2 days, plus 575 in the past week. Now, I round all these. So, this is just like the rounded aggregate numbers.

3:34 Very, very few, unfortunately, are moving in a good direction. So, I do have a per GPU trend analysis also that you can check this out if there's any particular ones you're interested in.

3:44 And I dropped a bunch of kind of prices that I have seen and observed over time. And I've got a really new cool historical lookup tool for the channel that I can kind of run against my own

3:56 data that I've created on Digital Spaceport over all these years where I can reference back specifics like videos like, hey, what did I see as far as prices for 3090s over the history of

4:07 this all the way back to $600 in the summer of 2024 to 133 plus percent uh rise of over over that time period. Ouch. and we're now at $1,400 for one. I've also broken it out into kind of the

4:22 enterprise mining. I would call these you're going to have something else that you're going to need to do like some external fans that you're going to need to force air through them. Things like

4:31 the V100 that can add quite a bit of additional noise. But seeing the 16 GB at 225 price per gigabyte, that comes out to be actually a fairly attractive GPU. Although I still think if you're

4:42 going to deal with the noise, you probably are better off going with the 32 GB. They both have 900 gigabytes per second. And I'm reading a lot of people are getting very positive results for

4:52 LLM only inference. But checking the price of various GPUs that I either have or I've been tracking for quite some time. And of course, we see also the 5090 accelerating and just taking off

5:05 since June going pretty much parabolic at this point. I think there's a good chance this year could be the worst that we've seen it happen. I do expect December to be the third consecutive

5:16 holiday spike and I do think that we will see a relief period that happens after that. Best case scenario, Q3 real relief has landed. Q4 hopefully things have changed. So, I do have some

5:29 predictions that I laid out here. I also put in whether or not I think it's a good thing to consider or buy on dips or avoid for certain GPUs. If there are GPUs that they seem like they might be

5:41 trending the right way, like the 5060Ti, that drops another 25, maybe another $50, I would be very surprised if it dropped another $50, but another $25 to $50, that may be actually not a bad

5:54 purchase. And definitely there are some others that are still in a budget, you know, kind of classification only like the 3060 12 GB. A couple of 3060 12 GB can actually run quite a bit of models.

6:06 Of course, the performance is going to be quite a bit lower than like a 3090 just because of the bandwidth on those. And I'm going to kind of update this every month at the end of the month for

6:15 the next month and see whether or not we can get a predictive model for where GPU prices and trends are heading that has any bearing in relationship to what actually pans out. But definitely on the

6:27 timing and execution of this, I do not expect there to be a relief, you know, going up to December. January probably we start to see some relief and hopefully positive trending as far as

6:38 returning to normality. But that's going to be the climb down from where the peak up was. And if you've been following along with this channel for a couple of years, you know that every time this

6:49 time of year happens, we got some great deals around this time of year in the past. But will we see any deals this year? That's a good question. 560 Ti 16 GB was one that I snagged around this

7:02 time of year, as well as the 960 XT. Those both actually were right around or near their MSRP prices. So that made good sense to buy them at those prices. Of course, now the 960 XT is the only

7:15 GPU out there that is not drastically inflated, that is also new and modern. So that's a hard reality to live with. Give it a check out. It's at digitalpaceport.com. And let me know

7:27 what you think in the comments below. If you're interested in learning more about how you can get up and running also with your own local AI, check out our builds playlist here. We've got a wide variety

7:37 of different machines that we've put together over time. So, check that one out. And we've also got our software playlist down here.