Nvidia’s US partner EVGA has reported that a shipment of GPUs it was sending to a distribution center was stolen from a truck.
A forum post by EVGA Product Manager Jacob Freeman states: “PLEASE NOTE that on October 29, 2021, a shipment of EVGA GeForce RTX 30 series graphics cards was stolen from a truck en route from San Francisco to our Southern California distribution center. “
“These graphics cards are in high demand, and each has an estimated retail value of $ 329.99 up to $ 1959.99 MSRP.”
Which probably explains the motivation for the crime – either someone is hoping to resell them or a crypto miner has just built a cheap rig.
Freeman’s Post doesn’t say how many GPUs were stolen or whether the truck was still hauling anything. However, he warned that buying stolen goods is a crime, as is “hiding the sale or holding back” stolen goods.
Then he seems to be setting some sort of trap by indicating that attempts to register products that have not been stolen will be successful on this page that requires registration. Crooks are probably smart enough to use fake data when registering. Also, are they smart enough to use a VPN and / or Tor to hide their traces?
EVGA created the email address stopRTX30theft@evga.com to help find the perpetrators.
The RTX-30 range is aimed at gamers and content creators, so this robbery makes it even more difficult to find a GPU for those suffering from low pixel counts and / or frame rates. Those who use GPUs for other tasks can already wait months to get their hands on the devices as COVID-crimped supply chains continue to delay production.
This situation will continue for many months: In August, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said he expected “an environment with supply bottlenecks for the vast majority of the next year”. ®
