Two pallets of RTX 5090s vanish in Brazil as the card goes missing from Nvidia's US store

A Brazilian distributor says two pallets of Zotac GeForce RTX 5090 graphics cards disappeared after landing at São Paulo/Guarulhos International Airport. Oderço Matos, president of the distributor Oderço, described the loss in a social media video on Saturday, October 17, and said the company had never lost a shipment in 38 years of business. The cards cost it about 2.5 million reais, roughly $495,000 by PC Gamer's conversion.

No one has confirmed a theft. Brazilian portal Terra reported that the cargo reached the airport but could not be located after the flight landed, and that the airport's operator, GRU Airport, had offered no conclusive explanation. Tech site Adrenaline says Oderço is still pressing airport authorities for answers. Neither outlet carries statements from police, the airline or Brazil's customs agency.

Oderço hasn't said how many cards were on the pallets. Tom's Hardware found the same Zotac model listed at R$33,999.99 by Brazilian retailer Promotech. At that price, 2.5 million reais would buy about 73 cards. Because Oderço's figure reflects what it paid rather than retail value, the real count was probably higher.

Nvidia says the 5090 isn't dead

The card was already scarce before the pallets went missing. PC Gamer noticed that it is no longer listed on Nvidia's official US marketplace, and a rumor spread last week that Nvidia had halted production to send the card's GB202 chip to professional and data center GPUs instead.

Jeff Fisher, a senior vice president at Nvidia, denied that on October 16 in Taipei, at the launch party for RTX Spark laptops. He told Taiwan's Central News Agency the rumor was "not true" and that Nvidia will keep shipping the RTX 5090. Speaking to 4Gamers, he acknowledged that supply-chain capacity is somewhat constrained. He gave no volumes and no restock date.

From $1,999 to about $8,000

The RTX 5090 launched at $1,999. Tom's Hardware found the Zotac version selling for around $8,000 on Amazon, four times that price. Hardware Busters, also drawing on Tom's Hardware, points to Newegg listings near $7,300 that appear to ship from overseas and Best Buy pages with essentially no stock.

What the 5090 is, and who it makes sense for

The RTX 5090 is Nvidia's most powerful consumer graphics card. What sets it apart is 32GB of GDDR7 video memory, the fast memory on the card that holds a game's textures and geometry or, for AI work, the model being run. Our VRAM guide treats 16GB or more as the comfortable target for 4K gaming, so the 5090 has twice that, and twice the 16GB on the RTX 5080. Nvidia's spec sheet lists up to 575 watts for the card alone and calls for a 1,000-watt power supply for the whole system. If your PC's power supply is smaller, you'll need to replace that too.

For gaming, it mainly pays off at 4K with every setting maxed and ray tracing on. The 32GB matters even more for running AI locally, because the card can hold models that won't fit on a 16GB GPU. Adrenaline notes that businesses buy the card in batches for that kind of work, demand that competes directly with gamers.

Where memory fits in

Nvidia hasn't blamed memory for the shortage, and Fisher said only that tight supply affects the whole industry. Still, the big memory makers are steering more production toward AI servers, which has pushed up RAM and SSD prices, as we covered in our guide to buying now or waiting for Black Friday. The professional RTX Pro 6000, built on the same Blackwell architecture, carries 96GB of GDDR7, three times as much as the 5090. The rumor Fisher denied assumed Nvidia gets more out of putting its GB202 chips in professional cards like that one than in the 5090, but no source has shown that this is what's behind the shortage.

If you're shopping for a GPU now

Nvidia says the RTX 5090 is still in production, but it hasn't said when more cards will arrive or how many, so no one can say when the card will sell for anything close to $1,999 again. If DLSS 5, Nvidia's AI image reconstruction, is what you're after, you don't need this card, because it runs across the RTX 50 lineup.