If you’ve tried to buy Nvidia’s flagship graphics card lately, you already know how scarce it is. Now one shipment of them has apparently vanished into thin air. A Brazilian electronics distributor says two pallets of GeForce RTX 5090 cards landed at São Paulo’s main international airport and then simply disappeared, and the story has PC gamers around the world talking.
What happened
The distributor, Oderço, took to Instagram pleading for answers after it couldn’t track down the shipment. According to Tom’s Hardware, the company said the two pallets of Zotac RTX 5090 cards were supposed to have arrived at Guarulhos International Airport, then disappeared. Oderço said it had never experienced anything like it in its 38-year history.
The shipment is valued at about R$2.5 million, or roughly $470,000, and that’s at the company’s acquisition cost, not the retail price the cards would sell for.
What the airport says
Brazil’s g1 news site reports that GRU Airport, the company that operates Guarulhos, said in a statement that it has been making every effort to resolve the situation and that the missing cargo had been formally reported to the authorities to support an investigation.
The operator also said it has been in contact with the importer’s representative and that on October 14, given the time that had passed, it sent instructions for starting a compensation claim. It’s now waiting for the customer to submit documentation so the process can be completed. Meanwhile, Oderço says it still hasn’t received a conclusive answer about where the cards are.
How many cards are we talking about?
Nobody has said exactly. Tom’s Hardware did some back-of-the-envelope math: with a Zotac RTX 5090 listed at about R$34,000 at one Brazilian retailer, the missing value works out to at least 63 cards, and likely many more since R$2.5 million is the wholesale cost.
Why this card is so hot right now
The timing makes the story even juicier. Tom’s Hardware reports that RTX 5090s are in short supply globally, with the card disappearing from many online retailers in mid-September. A Zotac model was going for around $8,000 on Amazon, far above its launch price. There have been rumors that Nvidia stopped producing the card to focus on pricier professional AI chips, though the company has insisted otherwise.
When a product is that scarce and that valuable, a couple of pallets of it is essentially a shipment of cash.
Not the first GPU heist headline
High-end graphics cards have a history of going missing. Tom’s Hardware points to past cases where retail customers lost cards in transit, buyers returned RTX 5090s with the core and memory stripped out, and thieves targeted AI hardware shipments. In one memorable case, a crew stole two trailers bearing the Nvidia logo, only to discover they were full of sand.
The internet weighs in
Online, the reaction has been a mix of sympathy and jokes. Commenters on the Tom’s Hardware story put “missing” in quotation marks and compared the case to a Fast and Furious plot. Others wondered whether the cards were ever actually on the plane. For now, that’s all speculation: no one has publicly explained what happened, and there’s no confirmed account of theft.
What happens next
For now, the case appears to be moving on two tracks: the authorities GRU Airport says it has notified, and the compensation process the operator has opened with the importer. Neither Oderço nor the airport has publicly shared a timeline, tracking details or the exact number of cards involved, so expect more updates if and when the investigation turns something up.
The bottom line
The cards may turn up, the investigation may find a paperwork mix-up, or this could become another chapter in the long saga of disappearing GPUs. Either way, it’s a reminder of just how valuable top-end graphics hardware has become, and why shipping it has started to look a lot like moving gold.
Image: Graphics Card Upgrading – 49259431802 by Keijiro Takahashi via Wikimedia Commons, CC0 1.0
