Nvidia RTX 5090 shipment worth $470,000 goes missing in Brazilian airport

A Brazilian electronics and IT distributor, Oderço, has gone on Instagram after failing to find answers about a missing shipment of RTX 5090 GPUs worth around $470,000 or R$2,500,000. According to its Instagram post [machine translated], the company has never faced an experience like this in its 38-year history. It was expecting two pallets of Zotac RTX 5090 GPUs at Guarulhos International Airport in São Paulo, which supposedly arrived there but then disappeared. The company has not provided any details, like the shipment’s arrival date or any tracking numbers, but claims that there hasn’t been any official response regarding its shipment inquiries. Because of this, the company went on the social media platform pleading for answers.

RTX 5090s are currently in short supply across the world, with the top-tier card disappearing from online retailers in the middle of September. There have been rumors that Nvidia has ceased production of the GPU to focus on more expensive professional AI cards, although it insists otherwise. Still, it doesn’t help that the flagship GPU is marked “not carried” in Micro Center’s online retail store, making it insanely difficult to find one of the best gaming GPUs you can buy today.

We don’t have any idea how many GPUs are missing, as the distributor only mentioned two pallets’ worth of RTX 5090s. A Zotac Gaming GeForce RTX 5090, which goes for around $8,000 on Amazon presently, is listed at R$33,999.99 on a Brazilian online retailer Promotech. This means that the company is missing 63 GPUs at the minimum, although this is likely going to be so much more considering that the $R2,500,000 amount the company said is its acquisition cost, not the retail price that it’s expected to go for.

We’ve seen various scams where retail customers lose their GPU shipments on the way to their home or delivery address, as well as unscrupulous buyers stripping off the GPU core and memory modules from an RTX 5090 and then shipping it back to the seller. This also isn’t the first instance that a shipment of high-value graphics cards has been stolen — one brazen crew has even rammed security escorts to hijack an AI hardware shipment, while another group stole two trailers marked with the Nvidia logo, only to find that it contained sand.

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