NVIDIA's flagship GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card is one of the hottest products in China right now, if you can get your hands on it, that is, you'll be paying double that price... which is seeing scalpers across the planet capitalize on expensive RTX 4090s being sold in China.
I was tagged once again by leaker I_Leak_VN on X, who pointed me to some pictures they had received from just one of the Vietnamese traders/scalpers that are hoarding GeForce RTX 4090 graphics cards to sell to China. You can see in the photos above and below that the reseller has scores of ASUS, GIGABYTE, and ZOTAC custom GeForce RTX 4090 cards.. where there have to be over 100 in these photos alone.
Vietnam is also on the list of banned countries that the Biden administration and US government have been stepping down on, so it's not just China. Scalpers and resellers are always going to take advantage, especially when the price of an RTX 4090 is pushing past $4000 USD in China... it's safe to say things are out of control.
However, China is getting a new GeForce RTX 4090D graphics card that features an AD102-250 GPU compared to the AD102-301 GPU that's inside of the regular RTX 4090. The new RTX 4090D graphics card will be making changes somewhere -- probably in a few places -- to have the RTX 4090D fall under the restrictions that the US has placed on many countries.
We should expect changes to the GPU, the GPU clock speeds, its memory configuration, AI capabilities, and I'm sure a few other surprises that will gimp the RTX 4090D from being used for AI-based workloads. This will be similar to the changed designs and software locks that NVIDIA places on its GeForce RTX series graphics cards back during the crypto mining insanity years... crypto mining first, and now AI.
We've also got the impending release of NVIDIA's new GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER... and then between the regular RTX 4090 the new RTX 4090D will slot in. How much slower will it be than the RTX 4090? How much faster will it be over the RTX 4080 SUPER? We only have a few weeks to find out.