The ongoing high-tech war between the USA and China is getting worse with the USA’s new export rules. Nvidia showed that it would comply with the rules by recently removing the GeForce RTX 4090 card, which falls within the scope of the new rules, from its official website in China. The $1,599 RTX 4090 has now gone through some modifications and started to be sold as an artificial intelligence GPU in China.RTX 4090s are being turned into AI GPUs
US export rules may have prohibited the sale of the RTX 4090 in China, but the fate of the cards already in the country is heading in an interesting direction. Apparently, Chinese companies are turning these cards into AI accelerators and selling them at high profits. According to reports, companies that stocked RTX 4090 shipments before the bans are dismantling almost all parts of both reference and custom design cards. Everything, including the GPU and GDDR6X memory, is removed from the main PCB and then integrated into a custom “reference” PCB.Reborn like Frankenstein, the AD102 GPU and memories are combined with a cooler with a blower-style fan, and then they are made ready for sale. To ensure that these cards work, companies also implement a testing process that runs Furmark, 3DMark and a number of artificial intelligence-focused applications. However, not many changes are required for AI software ecosystems to work with RTX 4090. This will make things even easier, as Nvidia recently brought TensorRT and TensorRT-LLM to Windows 11 systems. Of course, the AD102 GPU is not as fast as Nvidia’s H100 and other dedicated AI solutions, but it can already stand out as an affordable and high-performance solution. Since China does not have access to accelerators like the H100 and H800, RTX 4090 remains on the table as the only option.
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