A shipment of Nvidia RTX 5090 graphics cards valued at about $470,000 has gone missing at an airport in Brazil, according to the distributor handling the cargo. The company reported that two pallets of the flagship GPUs disappeared, though it did not specify an exact unit count. The loss adds to an already tight supply situation for the high-end card, which has been hard to find at US retailers.
The $470,000 figure reflects the distributor's acquisition cost rather than the retail price the cards would have sold for, suggesting the retail value of the missing shipment is higher. The distributor put its acquisition cost at R$2,500,000. Because the company mentioned only two pallets' worth of RTX 5090s, the precise number of missing GPUs is unknown.
Pricing at Brazilian retailers offers a rough sense of scale. A Zotac Gaming GeForce RTX 5090 is listed at R$33,999.99 on the Brazilian online retailer Promotech, while the same card sells for around $8,000 on Amazon. Based on those figures, the shipment would amount to at least 63 GPUs, and likely more given that the reported cost is not the retail price.
The missing shipment comes as RTX 5090 availability is limited worldwide. The top-tier card began disappearing from online retailers in the middle of September. Rumors have circulated that Nvidia has stopped producing the GPU to concentrate on more expensive professional AI cards, though the company insists that is not the case. Micro Center's online retail store lists the flagship GPU as "not carried," making it difficult for US buyers to find one of the best gaming GPUs on the market today.
The incident is not the first involving high-value graphics card cargo. One crew rammed security escorts to hijack an AI hardware shipment, and another group stole two trailers marked with the Nvidia logo, only to find that they contained sand. Retail customers have also lost GPU shipments en route to their homes or delivery addresses, and some buyers have stripped the GPU core and memory modules from an RTX 5090 before shipping it back to the seller.
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