Are US sanctions ineffective? Clearly, China still has access to equipment whose export is theoretically prohibited, and in large quantities. In a video circulating on Bilibili, we can see an automated factory extracting RTX 5090 (non-D) GPUs, along with its memory, to mount everything on a standard PCB destined for servers in the AI sector.
China converts RTX 5090s into AI cards by the bucketload!
What we’re seeing in this video isn’t a clandestine workshop with three workers working on a dirt floor, converting cards in small batches, no! What we’re dealing with here is a true assembly line. It’s automated, from the extraction of the GPU (and its memory) to its assembly on the new PCB. There’s very little human intervention: only the removal of the heatsinks and the cleaning of the GPU and memory are done manually . The question is more about how effective the sanctions are. Yes, the RTX 5090 may be banned from distribution in China, but the country still has massive access to these cards. In the video, we see whole stacks of cards ready for conversion. The question is how China gets a hold of these cards. From there, we can imagine purchases and detour via front companies, for example… Or even smugglers infiltrating certain manufacturers. In short, the aim of the maneuver is well known: to offer RTX 5090s in dual-slot format, mounted under a GPU blower, so as to fit a large number of them into a server. In this way, companies – and, by extension, the country – have the capacity to train ever more powerful AI models. However, this practice generates a lot of waste, some of which is sold off as scams. If you’ve heard of people buying second-hand cards sold without GPUs or memory, you should know that these cards are the residues of this activity.
