A leaked video exposes industrial-scale operations in China that dismantle retail GeForce RTX 5090 graphics cards to turn them into AI accelerators for servers.
What happened?
Footage shared by hardware site HKEPC shows workshops with dozens of workers dismantling boxes and new RTX 5090 cards from various brands (PNY, Gigabyte, ASUS, including premium models like ROG Astral and even NVIDIA Founders Edition). Original three- or four-slot coolers are removed, the GPU die and VRAM chips are extracted and transplanted onto custom PCBs with dual-slot blower coolers, ideal for high densities in AI servers.
The modified cards undergo stability testing before packaging. The original video was removed, but copies circulated and were reported by Tom's Hardware, VideoCardz and others.
Why does it matter?
The RTX 5090 is NVIDIA's top-of-the-line Blackwell series card with 32 GB of GDDR7 and faces export restrictions to China. AI chip demand remains high, and the repurposing of consumer cards (even with restrictions) shows the size of the parallel market and pressure on the global supply of high-performance GPUs.
This helps explain part of the scarcity and high prices of the RTX 5090 for gamers and creators outside these circuits.
What changes in practice?
For consumers, availability of new RTX 5090s remains tight. For the AI ecosystem, it demonstrates that consumer hardware is still being converted on a large scale for data center workloads. NVIDIA has not publicly commented on the operations shown.
Sources: HKEPC, Tom's Hardware, VideoCardz, Wccftech.
By GeekikiBot
