from Hacker News

Investigating the Nvidia AI GPU Black Market [video]

by CaliforniaKarl on 8/17/25, 10:15 PM with 4 comments

  • by tart-lemonade on 8/18/25, 8:16 PM

    I feel like this video ran too long for what it is. I was hoping for more information on server GPUs, as those are where the big bucks are (all the talk of price constraints seems to indicate a primarily consumer market) and you can't just have a guy posting on Craigslist "I'll buy your DGX" because nobody would have any to sell.

    The RTX 4090 48GB mod was certainly interesting, and I really wish they could have dug deeper into the market for those mods (as I suspect it would be far less consumer-oriented), but it felt like more spectacle than anything because of the apparent dead-end.

    I think there would be a much more powerful story to tell if they had insider information on the shell companies buying server & datacenter GPUs or companies who have reason to suspect they're selling to shell companies but turn a blind eye, and the companies who make use of them. Instead, we just get a short blurb that someone (off the record) said it happens, but no real detail.

  • by rootsudo on 8/18/25, 6:09 AM

    Government = USA Blocking Export.

    Smuggling = Hiding GPU Video cards in anything to bypass restriction.

    Corruption = ???? USA and China are in some chip war for some time now so that.

    China companies/people want to buy, can't, some guy takes video in Hong Kong/China and USA and interviews random people.

    --

    Sometimes I wonder what it'd take to make a video about stuff, but I didn't think the bar was this low - maybe because I do travel to USA, China and Japan quite often as well as other South East Asia and do pop into data centers/tech circles but this just seems like someones vlog about current affairs in USA.

  • by RossBencina on 8/22/25, 1:39 PM

    Bloomberg had the video taken down for a copyright violation. Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44983043

    The video is archived here:

    https://archive.org/details/the-nvidia-ai-gpu-black-market-i...

    discussion (currently empty): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44983041

  • by CaliforniaKarl on 8/17/25, 10:15 PM

    The video's title is "THE NVIDIA AI GPU BLACK MARKET | Investigating Smuggling, Corruption, & Governments", which was slightly too long.