Because people know Intel doesn't hold a candle to any of the competition so there is no demand for the cards. Nvidia and AMD can get away with their bullshit because people still buy their cards. And Intel is using older gen vram

I made the mistake of buying Intel's B70 to mess with local AI inference and quickly learned how shit their software stack is. They can't even be bothered to make the card work well for the only thing it's made for...

Because it has risen in price and availability is so sparse. Intel is playing under the same rules of scarcity as everybody else. There's simply less of these cards to go around as well. There's not a huge market available.

Base model has been sold out for a while. My closest Microcenter hasn't had them since last year. You could actually get them at MSPR($250) for a while too. The next cheapest version is a 3rd party model that has been siting at $290-$310 for most of the year now. Then there are these $500+ models that are basically collectors items at that price. Ebay is the wild west of prices and they're all $100 past where they're reasonable. Ebay's not a super trustable source either. Everything on NewEgg that is sitting at $250 is refurbished. The one new base model they have is almost $600. It makes no sense.

I've been in the market for one of these cards to replace my 5700xt. It's been a wild year keeping track of these prices. At times it is the best card available, and at other times you're playing a guessing game with older but stronger AMD stock. The kicker is the 12GB of VRAM. There's nothing in the price range of the Arc with that much VRAM. But there's also cards with less VRAM that are supposed to be more performant. As much as I want one, I'm probably gonna wait till the holiday season to see availability and sales. That's been the game since last year.