Man tries to smuggle seven-year-old AMD graphics cards through Chinese airport customs—all 44 of them

HardwareGraphics CardsMan tries to smuggle seven-year-old AMD graphics cards through Chinese airport customs—all 44 of themWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: MyDrivers)

An image showing Chinese custom officials with a haul of RX 580 graphics cards.

With the US ramping up bans on sending high-performance PC parts to China—and China nowreturning the favour—you’d think there would be a degree of interest in smuggling high-end PC parts into the country. This is not that. This is the case of a smuggler trying to move 44 AMD Radeon RX 580 graphics cards right under everyone’s noses.

The smuggler’s plan? Walk right out the front door of the airport with boxes full of GPUs. That’s right, walk right on through nothing to declare with an innocent smile on their face and hope Chinese customs won’t sniff him out. Unfortunately for the smuggler, they did.

According to theMydrivers report(viaTom’s Hardware), the 44 cards were intended to be refurbished and sold for profit. How much profit can you make on seven-year old, second-hand, most likely heavily used graphics cards? My guess would be ‘enough’ but I doubt it’s a massively profitable venture. The 8GB of VRAM on these cards isn’t ideal for working with AI models, either.

Getting just one RTX 4090 could be a very worthwhile trip for a smuggler these days, however. That card’s price has reportedly skyrocketed since the US hashalted Nvidia from selling any morein the country as part of a wider ban on powerful datacentre GPUs.

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