In a rather bizarre event, a total of 40 cargo units containing NVIDIA’s flagship Ampere GeForce RTX 3090 GPUs were stolen recently, just a few days ago from an MSI factory in China. There were rumors circulating on the web, Chinese news outlets and social media that this was a hoax, but MSI has confirmed the theft to Guru3D.
Thieves in China nicked CN¥ 2.2 million Chinese Yuan/RMB, or roughly USD $336,700 worth of RTX 3090 GPUs from an MSI factory, according to reports. The news first broke on Twitter; with the user @GoFlying8 posting an MSI document that addressed the theft.
MSI has notified the police, and the company has announced a reward of 100,000 Yuan ($15,000) for anyone who can provide some valuable information regarding this theft, or any whereabouts of the missing cards, which happened on December 7.
This roughly translates to 225 stolen graphics cards, based on RTX 3090’s $1,500 current MSRP value.
According to folks over at Ars Technica, MSI is still searching for the thieves, and they were also kind enough to translate the original document in English, which is presented below.
These are not freight containers actually, to clear up any confusion. Instead they’re sealed cardboard boxes with the manufacturers’ seal which are supposed to be shipped to the retailers. Each cargo unit usually contains between five to six cards (a rough estimate).
Given the stringency of MSI’s security procedures, the company believes this could have been an inside job, as the whole factory shipping area is covered by video/CCTV surveillance, and delivery trucks are routinely inspected as well. Hopefully, MSI should be able to recover its property and find whichever individual at the company is responsible for the thefts.
The shortage of the RTX 30-series GPUs has already caused a bit of concern in the PC gaming community, and it looks like someone decided that enough was enough and stole around 225 RTX 3090s.
Whilst this theft adds to increasingly bad news in the gaming community right now, it’s unsurprising given how much these RTX 3090 cards have been selling for, on online auction sites such as eBay (for as much as $2,250).
To make matters worse, Scalpers had the opportunity this year to buy these GPUs for the sole purpose of just making a profit off of it, and more specifically for selling it at a much higher price than the initial MSRP.
The latter half of 2020 has seen an increase of hardware thefts within the gaming industry. The missing 3090 cards join a list alongside PlayStation 5 consoles that mysteriously vanished while en route to their unfortunate buyers last month.
Stay tuned for more!
Hello, my name is NICK Richardson. I’m an avid PC and tech fan since the good old days of RIVA TNT2, and 3DFX interactive “Voodoo” gaming cards. I love playing mostly First-person shooters, and I’m a die-hard fan of this FPS genre, since the good ‘old Doom and Wolfenstein days.
MUSIC has always been my passion/roots, but I started gaming “casually” when I was young on Nvidia’s GeForce3 series of cards. I’m by no means an avid or a hardcore gamer though, but I just love stuff related to the PC, Games, and technology in general. I’ve been involved with many indie Metal bands worldwide, and have helped them promote their albums in record labels. I’m a very broad-minded down to earth guy. MUSIC is my inner expression, and soul.
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