- Despite US export restrictions forcing NVIDIA to sell degraded models (4090D/5090D) in China, Chinese buyers acquire full-spec GPUs through third-party gray markets.
- Chinese businesses build mobile server setups by fitting shipping containers with 288 liquid-cooled RTX 5090 cards.
- These containerized units include dedicated cooling radiators, air conditioning, storage arrays, and power generation to support the dense hardware.
NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 5090 is the undisputed king of consumer gaming graphics cards, delivering roughly 30% higher performance than the RTX 4090. The prices of these cards can reach €5,000 in some markets due to rising memory prices and they are seen as premium gaming hardware. However, in China, entrepreneurs are building a business selling hundreds of water-cooled RTX 5090s in containerized data centres.
For several years, China has suffered restraints and prohibitions imposed by the United States, preventing it from obtaining modern AI hardware and graphics cards. For example, NVIDIA had to build scaled-down versions of the RTX 4090 and RTX 5090, known as the RTX 4090D/5090D, with the latter featuring a V2 version that represented another limitation.
It’s interesting how, despite these prohibitions, China continues to obtain these types of graphics cards through third-party countries, thereby leveraging this “gray area” of the market. Now we’re seeing another application for these graphics cards: in China, servers are being sold inside shipping containers filled with RTX 5090 graphics cards.
Specifically, there are 288 RTX 5090s (it is unclear whether they are the normal variant, RTX 5090D, or RTX 5090D V2) cooled by a specialized liquid cooling system. Apparently, the radiators are located at the top of the cage, with fans exhausting the hot air from there.
Additionally, the container servers offered in China include air conditioning, a U2 array, and a power generator. As you might expect, the cost of over 300 of these graphics cards will be prohibitively expensive, but the complete installation and infrastructure will be considerably more costly.
The total cost of this project, including shipping, taxes, and maintenance, would be around $4.64 million, an amount that few would likely be willing to pay. Of course, there are far better solutions for AI data centers, but some customers may choose to have an RTX 5090 rather than a dedicated AI GPU.
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[Editor-in-Chief]
Sajjad Hussain is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Tech4Gamers.com. Apart from the Tech and Gaming scene, Sajjad is a Seasonal banker who has delivered multi-million dollar projects as an IT Project Manager and works as a freelancer to provide professional services to corporate giants and emerging startups in the IT space.
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