RTX 5090 missing shipment sparks shortage fears after $470k loss

Oderço, a Brazilian computer hardware importer based in Maringá, said in mid-October that two pallets of Zotac RTX 5090 cards had disappeared at São Paulo/Guarulhos International Airport. The company put the cost price at about 2.5 million reais, roughly $470,000.

The cards had been imported from the United States and were meant to travel on from Guarulhos to Curitiba. When it was time to move them, nobody could find them. Oderço, which has been in business for more than 38 years, went public on Instagram after it got no explanation from the airport or the authorities, saying it still had no answers.

At first it looked like lost freight. Within days it became clear this was a theft from inside the cargo terminal.

Police records reported in Brazil say the pallets landed on September 20. The very next day, before customs clearance was finished, security cameras caught two forklift drivers working for an outside contractor taking them out of the warehouse.

A third worker, whose job was checking consignments, is alleged to have released the goods in the computer system so they would pass the terminal’s electronic checks. The cards were then put on a truck that drove out of the airport and has not been found. Further reporting says the cargo labels were switched so the load looked like cheaper merchandise.

Investigators have not yet said whether all three workers knowingly took part. Accounts also differ on the paperwork: one version says the shipment was registered with customs on September 24, another says September 25. A later account of police records also lists some Zotac RTX 5070 and RTX 5080 cards in the haul, and the exact number of cards has not been made public.

The airport operator, GRU Airport, says the case was reported to the authorities, that the investigation is theirs to run, and that Oderço has been told how to seek compensation.

A Brazilian TV news program spotted one of the missing cards for sale on OLX, a popular online marketplace, for over $6,000. The photos clearly showed its serial number, which matched the stolen batch. The listing was then taken down.

Police found the seller in São Paulo state and arrested him on October 21 on suspicion of receiving stolen goods. A court later overturned that arrest after he showed he had bought the card on Mercado Livre, another big online store, and had asked for an invoice. The court said there was not enough evidence that he knew it was stolen. Police kept the card.

On October 22, Oderço’s president, Oderço Matos, said the serial numbers of all the missing cards had been cancelled for warranty purposes. They will not get warranty support in Brazil or abroad. That does not switch the cards off, but it makes them much harder to resell honestly.

The RTX 5090 is Nvidia’s flagship Blackwell gaming card, with 21,760 CUDA cores (the small processors that do the graphics math) and 32 GB of GDDR7 memory. Gamers want it, but so do people building machines for rendering, video work and running AI models at home.

That demand, plus a squeeze on supply as chipmakers favor far more profitable AI hardware, has sent prices sharply higher. The card launched at $2,000, passed $5,000 in September, and most US retailer listings now sit above $9,300. Nvidia has no 5090s on its own US store.

Rumors this autumn claimed Nvidia had stopped making the card so its GB202 chips could go to the pricier RTX Pro Blackwell workstation cards. Nvidia denied that in mid-October, while admitting that supply is limited. Thefts of high-end cards are not new either. Several Ampere-era shipments were stolen between 2020 and 2022, when RTX 3090s sold for around $2,000 to $2,500 during the crypto and pandemic shortages.

For most buyers, one stolen batch in Brazil will not change prices in the US, UK or Canada. The real lesson is about secondhand and marketplace deals, which is where stolen cards end up.

• Ask for the serial number before you pay, and check it with the card maker’s warranty support.
• Be wary of a 5090 priced well below what major retailers charge. Over $6,000 sounds like a lot, but it was a bargain by today’s standards, which is exactly what drew attention.
• Buy from authorized retailers where you can, and keep the invoice. In this case, an invoice from a big marketplace helped a buyer show he acted in good faith.

A card with a cancelled warranty may still work, but if it fails you have no support, and in Brazil it can be seized as evidence.