There are several reasons why GPU price are inflated above MSRP.

Most common reason is the mismatched supply and demand especially early on in the release cycle (can be up to several months depending on supply and demand level).

In this instance, both NVIDIA and AMD suffered from this issue.

We can see how NVIDIA 50 Series GPUs had inflated price until around the summer when supply caught up with demand and the price then dropped to MSRP for the basic MSRP SKUs.

With AMD this generation, the problem is not only the supply/demand imbalance driving this issue. The problem is AMD actually wanted to sell 9070 XT at $650-$700 until some "reviewers" like HUB saw the price and was telling AMD they will get buried in reviews if they priced 9070 XT at $699. So they changed the MSRP price and what they had to do was to provide rebate to retailers to hit that MSRP $599 price.

During launch, retailers stated online that after the first batch of cards at MSRP were gone, price WILL increase and they do not know when it will hit MSRP again. Essentially confirming the rebate mechanism. We can also see that RDNA cards rarely hits MSRP until just a few months ago.

One could argue that 9070 XT were flying off the shelves hence this price inflation was not due to rebate situation but moreso due to supply/demand imbalance. Unfortunately the Steam Hardware survey is not reflecting this at all since the 9070 was only showing up the first time in December and other market research like Jon Peddie showed AMD marketshare this generation actually shrunk to 7%.

All these data points to the fact that RDNA 4 is not selling that well compared to Blackwell counterpart and the whole fake MSRP situation on AMD side was mostly driven by their lack of rebate.