Rumor: NVIDIA reportedly cancels the 24GB RTX 5080 launch as GDDR7 memory costs soar

The 24GB version of NVIDIA’s RTX 5080 may never reach store shelves. According to a report from the Chinese hardware forum Board Channels, picked up by VideoCardz on Tuesday, NVIDIA has told its board partners that the planned January 2027 launch of a 24GB RTX 5080 in China is off — and no replacement date has been offered. The 16GB model it was supposed to replace will reportedly stay in production instead.

Treat all of this as rumor for now. NVIDIA has never publicly acknowledged the 24GB card, let alone its cancellation, and VideoCardz tags its own report as a rumor, noting it has no concrete confirmation from its own sources. But the report has spread fast — it was the highest-velocity hardware story on Reddit’s AI forums this morning — and the reason it gives is specific enough to take seriously: the memory got too expensive.

What the report says#

The Board Channels post, in machine translation, says NVIDIA “has internally notified its AIC (add-in card) partners to officially cancel the January 2027 launch plan for this model, and there is no clear subsequent launch schedule.” It describes the move as a “temporary cancellation” made “because the price of 3GB memory chips cannot be reduced; the cost is too high, making it economical to meet market demands.”

The 24GB card was reportedly meant to replace the 16GB model and become NVIDIA’s flagship GeForce card in China. Earlier reports had suggested NVIDIA would wind down shipments of the 16GB 5080 and the 5090 to make room for it. The new report says those plans have changed: instead of introducing the 24GB variant, NVIDIA will reportedly keep supplying GPUs built around 2GB GDDR7 chips, letting board partners keep manufacturing the 16GB card — a model that had been expected to reach the end of its production run.

Why memory killed it#

The 24GB card would have used eight 3GB GDDR7 modules instead of the eight 2GB modules in the current card — 50% more memory on the same bus, with no new GPU required. That is an elegant way to build a bigger card. The problem is the price of the parts: the 3GB GDDR7 chips reportedly cost roughly three times as much as their 2GB counterparts, and at that premium the card becomes hard to sell at any sane price.

Earlier rumors had put the 24GB card’s price at £2,250 / $2,999 if it launched — more than the RTX 5090’s original MSRP, for a card with 8GB less memory and less than half the CUDA cores. At that price, as Club386 puts it, it just wouldn’t sell.

The memory problem is not unique to this card. Similar pricing issues have already been linked to delays for the RTX 5080 SUPER, another card expected to carry 24GB of GDDR7. If 3GB chips stay this expensive, the whole 24GB tier is stuck — not just one model.

What Reddit made of it#

The story surfaced on r/LocalLLaMA early Tuesday morning and quickly became the fastest-moving hardware post of the day, gathering more than 200 upvotes within two hours of being posted. The top comments treated it as an unconfirmed rumor and were openly skeptical — one commenter noted that similar stories had circulated a year earlier and not panned out.

Others pushed back on the idea that 16GB is now a permanent ceiling, pointing to higher-VRAM cards from AMD and Intel as proof the limit is economic, not technical. The thread’s verdict, in short: nobody is treating the cancellation as confirmed, but nobody is surprised that memory prices are the thing that killed it.

What to watch#

First, CES 2027 in January, which VideoCardz has previously noted as a possible stage for an announcement. If NVIDIA says nothing about a 24GB card there, the variant is effectively dead — at least for now.

Second, whether NVIDIA says anything at all. The company has confirmed neither the card nor the cancellation, and the confusion around its plans is the story in itself: a flagship-tier product reportedly planned, then reportedly scrapped, without a single public word.

And third, the memory market. If 3GB GDDR7 stays roughly three times the price of 2GB, the economics do not change — and the 16GB 5080 remains the top of NVIDIA’s GeForce stack in China. AMD, reportedly planning one desktop model on its RDNA 5 architecture in 2027, may find the opening useful.