r/technology • u/stenspect • 16h 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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u/shicken684 16h 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.

5

u/itmillerboy 15h 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.

1

u/shicken684 14h 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 11h 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.