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Leaked video exposes how industrial-scale Chinese factories are dismantling RTX 5090s by the thousands to fuel AI servers — GPU die and memory desoldered and transplanted to blower designs; custom cards to Nvidia Founders Editions on the chopping block If you are wondering why the GeForce RTX 5090, despite being one of the best graphics cards, has evaporated from retail shelves, the answer lies in China’s industrial conversion factories. A newly surfaced video reveals the staggering scale of the country’s grey-market AI operations, showing industrial workshops dismantling brand-new GeForce RTX 5090 graphics cards to repurpose them for the AI boom. So, what exactly is a GeForce RTX 5090 doing in China when the graphics card is not even officially available there? The answer is simple. They are there to be transformed into AI workhorses. The recently leaked footage offers a glimpse inside these Chinese workshops, where skilled technicians meticulously desolder the pricey flagship’s GB202 silicon and GDDR7 memory chips. They then transplant the components into a dual-slot blower design tailored for server use. The GeForce RTX 5090 blower graphics cards will ultimately end up in high-density server racks where they will become the backbone of massive AI compute clusters. The scale and efficiency of these operations are impressive, with production lines converting shipments of brand-new GeForce RTX 5090 graphics cards, from Nvidia's custom partner models to the chipmaker's highly coveted Founders Edition. After testing and validation, workers would repackage these modified GeForce RTX 5090 graphics cards and ship them to clients, likely data centers or AI labs. Many of these Chinese factories are scattered throughout the country. The conversion process is massive in scale, and probably thousands of GeForce RTX 5090 graphics cards are being repurposed every day. Middlemen in these grey-market supply chains are constantly hunting for GeForce RTX 5090 stock to fuel these operations. Nvidia has reportedly halted production of the GeForce RTX 5090 and is, in all likelihood, redirecting the valuable silicon to higher-margin professional GPUs like the RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell. At the same time, a vast network of Chinese conversion factories continues to operate at full speed. Redirected supply and aggressive grey-market recycling have nearly wiped out GeForce RTX 5090 stock from U.S. retailers. Custom GeForce RTX 5090 graphics cards now start at an eye-watering $8,500. However, a new workaround has emerged to sidestep the stock shortage and inflated prices: prebuilt gaming systems. Sometimes these GeForce RTX 5090 prebuilts cost less than a standalone GeForce RTX 5090, while offering a fully assembled system with a manufacturer's warranty. If you had told me a few months ago that buying an entire gaming system would be cheaper than a single high-end graphics card, I would have called you insane. Yet here we are. In today’s chaotic market, prebuilt systems often offer better value than standalone graphics cards. Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox. Follow Tom's Hardware on Google News, or add us as a preferred source, to get our latest news, analysis, & reviews in your feeds. Zhiye Liu is a news editor, memory reviewer, and SSD tester at Tom’s Hardware. Although he loves everything that’s hardware, he has a soft spot for CPUs, GPUs, and RAM.
Leaked video exposes how industrial-scale Chinese factories are dismantling RTX 5090s by the thousands to fuel AI servers — GPU die and memory desoldered and transplanted to blower designs; custom cards to Nvidia Founders Editions on the chopping block If you are wondering why the GeForce RTX 5090, despite being one of the best graphics cards, has evaporated from retail shelves, the answer lies in China’s industrial conversion factories. A newly surfaced video reveals the staggering scale of the country’s grey-market AI operations, showing industrial workshops dismantling brand-new GeForce RTX 5090 graphics cards to repurpose them for the AI boom. So, what exactly is a GeForce RTX 5090 doing in China when the graphics card is not even officially available there? The answer is simple. They are there to be transformed into AI workhorses. The recently leaked footage offers a glimpse inside these Chinese workshops, where skilled technicians meticulously desolder the pricey flagship’s GB202 silicon and GDDR7 memory chips. They then transplant the components into a dual-slot blower design tailored for server use. The GeForce RTX 5090 blower graphics cards will ultimately end up in high-density server racks where they will become the backbone of massive AI compute clusters. The scale and efficiency of these operations are impressive, with production lines converting shipments of brand-new GeForce RTX 5090 graphics cards, from Nvidia's custom partner models to the chipmaker's highly coveted Founders Edition. After testing and validation, workers would repackage these modified GeForce RTX 5090 graphics cards and ship them to clients, likely data centers or AI labs. Many of these Chinese factories are scattered throughout the country. The conversion process is massive in scale, and probably thousands of GeForce RTX 5090 graphics cards are being repurposed every day. Middlemen in these grey-market supply chains are constantly hunting for GeForce RTX 5090 stock to fuel these operations. Nvidia has reportedly halted production of the GeForce RTX 5090 and is, in all likelihood, redirecting the valuable silicon to higher-margin professional GPUs like the RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell. At the same time, a vast network of Chinese conversion factories continues to operate at full speed. Redirected supply and aggressive grey-market recycling have nearly wiped out GeForce RTX 5090 stock from U.S. retailers. Custom GeForce RTX 5090 graphics cards now start at an eye-watering $8,500. However, a new workaround has emerged to sidestep the stock shortage and inflated prices: prebuilt gaming systems. Sometimes these GeForce RTX 5090 prebuilts cost less than a standalone GeForce RTX 5090, while offering a fully assembled system with a manufacturer's warranty. If you had told me a few months ago that buying an entire gaming system would be cheaper than a single high-end graphics card, I would have called you insane. Yet here we are. In today’s chaotic market, prebuilt systems often offer better value than standalone graphics cards. Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox. Follow Tom's Hardware on Google News, or add us as a preferred source, to get our latest news, analysis, & reviews in your feeds. Zhiye Liu is a news editor, memory reviewer, and SSD tester at Tom’s Hardware. Although he loves everything that’s hardware, he has a soft spot for CPUs, GPUs, and RAM. - thisisaname Is this where fakers get their boards to populate with fake chips to sell outside one?Reply - ohio_buckeye If I were to hazard a guess that might be the reason 5090s are suddenly discontinued in order to cut off their supply. Selling back the bare boards would be a convenient way to recoup cash.Reply - quorm This has been happening since nvidia stopped selling blower versions of their consumer cards, so the first RTX generation. Meanwhile, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta etc. have warehouses of nvidia gpus they have spent billions on and may never use. Seems like there is an actual demand for gpus in China. Maybe Amazon, Microsoft, Meta could lobby the government to cut their losses and sell their gpus to China. Reply - Pete Mitchell Hopefully we’ll get to a point in the not too distant future where someone designs an AI chip that performs better than GPUs. Like what happened with Bitcoin mining.Reply - MJS WARLORD If China was able to buy the cards in such large numbers then the manufactures and the shippers should have heard the alarm bells ringing or did they just turn a blind eyeReply - ohio_buckeye Wasn’t a shipment of them just stolen? Plus a bunch of people seem to be cashing them out by selling so who knows where those are actually going.Reply - PEnns Pete Mitchell said:Hopefully we’ll get to a point in the not too distant future where someone designs an AI chip that performs better than GPUs. Like what happened with Bitcoin mining.Amen! I was thinking about the same thing lately!! Reply - ejolson Hybrid warfare that uses sock puppets, troll farms and useful idiots to convince governments in democratic countries to stop the construction of sovereign datacenters, in turn, allows the rapid buildout of AI factories by authoritarian governments in hostile foreign countries. The plan, of course, is to take over the world.Reply - thestryker thisisaname said:Is this where fakers get their boards to populate with fake chips to sell outside one?Yeah it's one of the main sources of boards and coolers. The first time a lot of that cropped up was with the 4090 due to doing board swaps to double the memory. They are compatible with 3090 Ti boards so there were a lot of board swaps being done. Reply - jtcmedia Pete Mitchell said:Hopefully we’ll get to a point in the not too distant future where someone designs an AI chip that performs better than GPUs. Like what happened with Bitcoin mining.I can see this happening. It's going to take several years for models to mature that specific ASICs will be cost effective to design for. The whole GPU market could be turned on its head in half a decade. Reply
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