Micro Center requires photo ID and signed no-export pledge to buy RTX 5090 gaming GPU

A Micro Center customer who bought an RTX 5090 in Tustin, California, was required to sign an Advanced Computing Product Purchaser Declaration form, which bars exporting the GPU, before being approved to purchase the GPU. According to u/Krothic’s post on the r/Microcenter subreddit, they bought a PowerSpec AI90 Workstation with an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X CPU, an RTX 5090 Founders Edition GPU, 64GB DDR5-6000 RAM, and a 2TB SSD from the retailer and were surprised when the manager required them to sign the form.

The form requires a prospective RTX 5090 buyer to give their full legal name, residential or business address, government-issued photo ID, phone & email, actual end user (if different from purchaser), location where the product will be installed, and its intended end use. It also says, “NO EXPORT - NO EXCEPTIONS. Micro Center will not sell this product to a purchaser who intends to export, reexport, resell, transfer, or otherwise cause it to leave the United States, regardless of destination.” Micro Center did not mention why it recently began requiring the form, especially as other commenters in the Reddit post said that they weren’t required to do so previously. However, one other person said in the thread that they had to fill out a similar but longer form when they bought a GPU from Central Computers last summer.

Even though GPUs that have the processing power of RTX 4090s or higher were first banned for export to China in November 2023, U.S. authorities only started seriously clamping down on smuggling operations recently. One major arrest, so far, is that of three Supermicro employees, including its co-founder, Yih-Shyan “Wally” Liaw, who are suspected of illicitly shipping $2.5 billion worth of Nvidia hardware to China. There have also been anecdotal reports of people buying used RTX 5090s in the U.S. en masse, arriving with testing rigs built into their cars and paying sellers in cash.

It’s unclear how these Micro Center forms will stop or prevent the smuggling of RTX 5090 GPUs, especially as they don’t list the serial number of the GPU being sold. The policy is possibly a deterrent for those who casually purchase high-end equipment like this and sell it to another buyer at a higher price, whether that buyer plans to use it locally or export it illegally.

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