Now that the U.S. has tightened its ban on sending high-performance PC parts to China, and China has returned the favor, you would think that there would be some level of interest in smuggling high-end PC parts into the country. This is not the case. This is a case of smugglers trying to move 44 AMD Radeon RX 580 graphics cards right under everyone's noses. As it is, he walks right through with an innocent smile on his face, declaring nothing and hoping that Chinese customs won't sniff him out. Unfortunately for the smuggler, he is found.

Mydrivers reports (via Tom's Hardware) that the 44 cards were refurbished and intended to be sold for a profit; "how much profit can you make on a seven-year-old, used, and possibly overused graphics card?" my guess is "enough." But I don't think it's a venture that will make a lot of money. The 8GB of VRAM on these cards is also not ideal for dealing with AI models.

However, acquiring just one RTX 4090 could be a very worthwhile trip for a recent smuggler. Prices for the card have reportedly skyrocketed since Nvidia stopped selling any more in the country as part of a broader U.S. ban on powerful data center GPUs.

The report includes various images of customs officials standing by luggage, as seems to be customary in China.

There have been various cases of customs officials uncovering PC hardware smuggled across the border. Last year, someone tried to bring 84 SSDs inside an electric scooter, which was at least quite ingenious, and the year before that, a woman pretending to be pregnant hid 200 CPUs and nine iPhones inside a baby bump with prosthetic legs. Eventually they were caught, as was a man who made relatively little effort to hide his smuggling, but who knows how many made it through the customs net.