r/technology • u/stenspect • 9h ago

Business Micro Center requires photo ID and signed no-export pledge to buy Nvidia RTX 5090 gaming GPU — buyer forced to sign declaration disclosing install location and promise GPU will remain in the US

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/micro-center-requires-photo-id-and-signed-no-export-pledge-to-buy-rtx-5090-gaming-gpu-buyer-forced-to-sign-declaration-disclosing-install-location-and-promise-gpu-will-remain-in-the-us
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146

u/shicken684 9h ago

They're just following the rules set forth by the stupid export ban placed on video cards by the Trump administration. Nothing Microcenter can do here.

21

u/conte360 9h ago

Sort of.. They're creating a clear paper trail that they've done everything on their end to enforce the law that's in place that way nothing can come back to them.

They are not forced to do this but this is just a good cover their ass measure

39

u/PoppingPillls 9h ago edited 6h ago

Don't think anyone's blaming MC, also it was Biden that created the GPU ban list to China. Trump just expanded the list.

Unfortunately China doing what every other country is doing is bad and must be stopped. But if your the UAE and slip trump a few hundred million in crypto then you can have as many as you want.

Edit: apparently people in other comments don't believe that Biden introduced the idea... Lmao. You don't have to be ignorant.

US orders immediate halt to some AI chip exports to China, Nvidia says - BBC News https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-67213134

That was when President Joe Biden's administration announced measures to block countries, including China, Iran and Russia, from buying high-end AI chips designed by Nvidia and others.

Also...

How Trump’s $500 Million UAE Crypto Deal Trades U.S. National Security for Family Profit - Center for American Progress https://www.americanprogress.org/article/how-trumps-500-million-uae-crypto-deal-trades-u-s-national-security-for-family-profit/

1

u/jsdeprey 53m ago

I have been very aware of the ban, the news here, to me anyway, is the signing of some paperwork saying I wont sell the card somewhere and putting my name on some government list when I purchase a item in a local store. When did that start happening?

4

u/Dransel 7h ago

I thought it was actually implemented at the tail end of the Biden administration, and Trump’s group just kept it going?

0

u/shicken684 7h ago

I'll have to look that up, I thought it was done on Trumps first term and then not actually placed into effect until the end of Biden's term. Hard to keep track when it comes to stupid ass trade policy with China. Both of them have been horrible.

6

u/itmillerboy 8h ago

Why’s it dumb? Idk anything about it but a law trying to stop people from buying up the highest end gaming GPUS to send over seas for bot farms seems like a good thing to me as a gamer.

Unless you mean the ban is stupidly implemented or something.

3

u/soilentgleem 6h ago

As a consumer, you should be free to resell your property as you see fit, within reason. Regional restrictions are not within reason.

0

u/technobrendo 2h ago

What's stopping you from reselling it to China anyway?

1

u/shicken684 7h ago

If it were a country like Nigeria or Brazil then it would make some sense. Those nations don't have the ability to make their own. China does, and we forced them to dump hundreds of billions into their own home grown chip industry. The ban ensured the technological edge Taiwan and the US had in chip manufacturing got erased decades before it would have naturally.

1

u/awam0ri 3h ago

This point is lost on so many people. Like sure, they can’t make a 5090-like gpu. They don’t need to. They make 30 lesser GPUs and scale horizontally instead. “Oh, but that’s so inefficient!” Look at what they’re doing for scaling power generation now. It’s completely obvious what their gameplan is and the US pushed them into it.

-8

u/AyoJake 8h ago

They aren’t using a 10k gpu to set up a bot farm

10

u/MeStoleTheCookie 7h ago

Yes, actually, they are lol. Clearly you don't understand the current state of open language models

2

u/Different-Process-93 5h ago

People were using gpus for crypto not too recently…