The MSRP is a good proxy for the 'level' of a card. It's not like the 4090 was a freak outlier. Cards of a comparable price offer comparable performance. So the 'level' for running a frontier level model at high performance is now at $1600 and continuing to trend sharply downwards.

Another nuance is that the computer hardware market is currently extremely inefficient in a way I don't understand. You can pick these cards up locally at places throughout Asia for around $2k new. That's retail single unit prices. No idea what's stopping somebody from closing the gap and making a ton of money - perhaps tariffs and data centers purchasing in a price insensitive fashion. Whatever the exact reason may be, what people pay for hardware is increasingly just radically different depending on where you buy it at.

That arbitrage opportunity is remarkable. Maybe duty/taxes, as you say?

I'm the guy who (Who plays games and runs molecular dynamics simulations and other CUDA stuff) said 3 years ago "$1600 for a graphics card? That is excessive. I'll upgrade in a few years when ready" And bought a 4080 for $1200 from Nvidia instead of the 4090. Oops! Now there is no reasonable upgrade path.