Seeing a unicorn is easier than finding an Nvidia RTX 5090. I’d say it’s more likely to touch the 500 euro bill: high-powered graphics cards have become unaffordable. Although stores barely get stock, and prices skyrocket, it seems that a large part of the supply ends up in the hands of other players: Chinese data centers are stocking Nvidia graphics. After dismantling.
Industrial scale dismantling. As published by specialized media HKEPC, Chinese factories break new graphics cards to equip AI servers. In the videos you can see how Chinese operators unsolder graphics chips and GDDR7 memory modules to assemble them into custom-designed boards.
The Asus RTX 5090 is ready for the teardown process. Photo by HKEPC
So that motherboards fit into the narrow gaps of servers without heating up, assemblers attach turbine cooling systems to them. It’s estimated that Chinese workshops are capable of converting thousands of RTX 5090s per day, all while ignoring an essential detail: Chinese industry isn’t supposed to have access to these Nvidia graphics cards.
The change in cooling allows more cards to be placed together in the server, making it easier to scale the infrastructure
The pledge is a dead letter. In the United States, establishments such as Micro Center have begun requiring some buyers to sign a statement promising not to take the graphics out of the country. The store even asks for official identification and where the computer will be installed. This is particularly so, as trade restrictions in the US prevent NVIDIA from selling its most powerful GPUs in China, such as the conventional RTX 5090. Breaking down the cards shows that the constraints are not 100% effective
And in the middle of it, the player. Although Nvidia insists it’s still making units, and we’ve found out where some unreleased cards end up, coming across an RTX 5090 in European stores is nothing short of a miracle. If any of them appear on the shelves, they do so at figures that are out of players’ pockets. Therefore, a device that was targeted at that audience ended up being a very different one due to pure speculation.
We are witnessing a paradox: the most powerful graphics card on the private market, designed to crush video games, can end its life without running a single one. AI fever means even hardware designed for gaming finds a very different fate. Even ignoring the ban.
Through this GryOnline
Cover image Ivan Linares
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