Enlarge /. The GPU Grinch doesn't care about your lists or whether you've been naughty or nice.
Sometime over the past week, thieves stole a large number of Nvidia-based RTX 3090 graphics cards from the MSI factory in mainland China. The news came from Twitter user @ GoFlying8, who posted an official MSI internal document about the theft this morning, along with comments from a Chinese-language website.
Roughly translated – in other words, OCR scanned, run through Google Translate, and with the worst edges that you really saw off – the MSI document goes something like this:
Ensmai Electronics (Deep) Co., Ltd.
announcement
Memo No. 1-20-12-4-000074
Subject: Regarding the theft of the graphics card, a reward is in order.
Explanation:
- Recently, high-price graphics cards made by criminals have been stolen by criminals. The case has now been reported to the police. At the same time, I also hope that all of the company's employees will actively and truthfully report this case.
- Anyone who provides information to resolve this case will receive a reward of 100,000 yuan. The company promises to keep the whistleblower's identity strictly confidential.
- If any person is involved in the case as of the date of the public announcement, report it to the company's audit department or the head of the dispute department. If the report is truthful and helps to recover the missing items, the company will report to the police but will ask for your forbearance. The law should be treated seriously.
- With this announcement, I urge my colleagues to be professional, ethical, disciplined, learn from cases, and be warned.
- Reporting Tel: (elided)
Registration mailbox of the Court of Auditors: (elected)
4th December 2020
There has been some confusion about theft in English-language technical media; The MSI document itself is from last Friday and does not contain any information about how many cards were stolen or what the total value was. The surrounding comment – from what appears to be a Chinese news app – claims the theft affected about 40 containers of RTX 3090 cards, valued at about 2.2 million renminbi ($ 336,000).
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If the reported value is correct and relates to the suggested retail price of the cards, there are approximately 224 stolen GPUs. The cards could actually sell for significantly more as supply is low and demand is very high. Scalpers have reportedly received legitimate bids of up to $ 20,000 on eBay for a single RTX 3090, with typical auctions going for more than $ 2,600.
