I ordered a few Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 580 in the beginning of August @150€ (distributor prices), now they are about 190€ !!
I believe there is new interest in (GPU) mining for those spikes which got attention. Even though it is not that profitable
That's what I'm talking about!
Also, Newegg has "limit 6" on some of their GPUs on sale. Like the MSI RX 5600XT MX Gaming for $269.99. Note that, traditionally, when Newegg wanted to limit quantities, they used to put "limit 5 per customer", or "limit 2...", or "limit 1...".
The fact that they are now stating "limit 6" on GPU purchases of certain kinds, is also indicative that they KNOW that miners are buying them, because they fill out GPU rigs in groups of six cards, most of them.
Edit: Plenty of mining YouTubers are saying, "GPU mining, STILL PROFITABLE", and "GPU mining, PROFITABLE AGAIN", and "DUST OFF those GPU mining rigs, and FIRE THEM UP". Stuff like that, building the hype. And then there's the DeFi movement, which appears to be bursting it's bubble recently, and the high "Gas" fees with ETH, increasing the block rewards (fairly recently, but it seems like that mostly petered out).
Note: I'm not advising anyone to actually go out and buy more GPUs for mining, heck no, but I did recently, and when I finally got them installed, drivers re-installed, and flashed the BIOSes on them (RX5600 XT refurbs with original 12Gbit/sec GDDR6 BIOSes), and then my earnings dropped from like $3/day on both PCs to like just above $2/day, kind of disappointing, but still (slightly) profitable. Don't know if my $500 (+tax) GPU purchase(s) are going to pay off, though, if earnings keep dropping. At least, the RX 5600XT is a viable 1440P gaming card, I can always sell a few of my rigs as gaming PCs. (Well, they basically ARE, they're just mining at the moment.)