234
cross-posted from: https://piefed.ca/post/152656
But now that Nvidia agreed to pay a bribe to the government it's no longer black market
this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2025
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Funny thing is 'Local ML' tinkerers largely can't afford GPUs in the US either.
The 5090 is ludicrously expensive for its VRAM pool. So is the 4090, which is all but OOS. Nvidia will only sell you a decent-sized pool for $10K. Hence non-techbros here have either been building used RTX 3090 boxes (the last affordable compute GPU Nvidia ever sold), EPYC homelabs for CPU offloading, or have been trying to buy those modded 48GB 4090s back.
The insane supply chain is something like this:
-
Taiwan GPUs -> China
-
China GPU boards -> US
-
US GPU Boards -> Smuggled back into China
-
Deneutered GPU Boards -> Sold back to US
All because Nvidia is playing VRAM cartel and AMD, inexplicably, is uninterested in competing with it when they could sell 48GB 7900s basically for free.
It's not explicable why AMD is not breaking rank on VRAM and vGPU, same reason as failing Intel.
But the reason is not mentionnable in polite company and it relates to why AMD exists at all.
By all accounts, AMD should have gone under decades ago, instead they're one of the only x86 platform licensee and they got that basically because of a fluke in history.
But here's the real deal, because of the regulatory environment, monopolies are technically illegal. Of course since 1980s enforcement of that has been a total joke as proven with the failure of the Microsoft anti-trust case. Anti-trust is currently neutered and even back then it wasn't really "anti-trust", merely anti-monopoly. That is the playbook for Intel and Nvidia that allows AMD to continue existing. They exist so that the other two aren't monopolies. They are kept alive as long, some market segments will have some competition and other will simply not be touched by Intel and AMD, dynamically decided, kind of like splitting territory, so that AMD can always survive.
So that Intel and Nvidia don't became actually illegal monopolies. This is a very conservative playbook as since the 90s they could have very well become monopolies and the neolibs wouldn't have squeaked. They would have cheered !
That's why you're not getting that actually threatening to Nvidia amounts of VRAM and vGPU from AMD and why they're dropping support for their 2018 datacenter GPU if they get a little too much of a good deal on the used market.
The solution is simple, destroy nvidia, not a calculated and gentle trust bust, no, break the company so it stops existing as a coherent entity.
Nvidia is a bunch of software and PNGs on top of TSMC. Break Nvidia, break Intel, break microsoft, break cisco, broadcom, break everything in silicon valley and put it all in a blender. And if anything grows too big again, break it the duck up again.
You could also buy the Apple Studio with its large amount of unified ram for a similar price of a 5090. Of course it’s not as fast but it could run a model that needs more ram.
The pricing for memory is still pretty bad. $4K for 96GB, $5.6K for 256GB, $10K for 512GB. One can get 128GB on the M4 Max for $3.5K, at the cost of a narrower bus so it's even slower, but generally, EPYC + a 3090 or 4090 makes a lot more sense.
SOTA quantization for these are mostly DIY. There aren't many MLX DWQs or trellis-quantized GGUFs floating around.
But if you want to finetune or tinker instead of just run, you're at an enormous disadvantage there. AMD's Strix Halo boards are way more compatible, but not standalone yet and kinda rare at this point.
My god, this is the LOTR Extended Edition of tech journalism videos
Any TL;DR on this? Nvidia secretly ships sanctioned GPUs to China?
GPUs that are banned from export to China can be easily acquired in low numbers in the country due to individuals bringing in banned GPUs which get sold just like unbanned GPUs after passing through several people. Also possible that some banned cards are repaired QC failures from the Chinese factories that produce these cards (the cards are produced in China, but are supposed to be exported and banned from export back into China). The export restrictions present more of a barrier for building out large AI clusters with many, many GPUs.
Nvidia almost certainly knows about this but turns a blind eye because they want to sell more cards and China is a large market.
There are some repair shops in China that can not only repair the GPUs, but can also transfer the GPU die onto an aftermarket PCB and give it double the amount of VRAM to create a card that Nvidia doesn't even sell.
Individual banned GPUs are easier to get than the full systems that Nvidia also sells. AMD GPUs are much less popular, Intel GPUs are basically non-existent. The overall most popular card for smuggling into China seems to be the RTX 4090.
Thanks!
Sad to see all this effort has to be put into making sanctions and then into evading them.
I can't wait for this fucking bubble to burst.
I really respect Gamers Nexus for actually doing the shit Linus Tech Tips just haws and haws over.
I don't think LTT ever did or claimed to do investigative journalism (or really journalism at all)?
They make entertainment videos that sometimes have mildly informative value.
I just got sick of there always being a new "controversy" with him and his inability to seem like he gives a shit about it. Each time he gets accused of something, whether he did it or not, he just goes on the WAN show to sigh as big as possible and say "Guys..."
I don’t think LTT ever did or claimed to do investigative journalism (or really journalism at all)?
But thats how it's presented, and that's how many viewers interpet it.
First it's not investigative journalism, it's hardware reviews that may or may not reveal problems, and he fakes and cheat with his, and takes money illegally under the table for making good reviews.
Difference between him and for instance Gamers Nexus, is that Gamers Nexus reveals if he detects something is off when he tests. While LTT prefer to get companies to pay for good reviews that gloss over the problems.
People are idiots if they believe your claim is true, and apparently most do?!
LTT and gamers nexus face similar but not exactly the same pressures. Gamers nexus is able to be more aggressive than Linus is but Linus structures his business on such a way that made it vulnerable to such a thing.
The clearest example of this was when the Intel overcoming bug was being hidden by Intel PR spin and GN noticed a pattern, said fuck all that noise, and raised hell over it. GN was right. Intel was wrong. And GN was rewarded for it. Linus has to keep sponsors happy whereas GN regularly throws punches with industry titans like NVIDIA.
The risk is higher but so is the reward. People trust GN specifically because of that reputation. Linus is fun, his channel is interesting, but he’s squarely in the influencer/entertainment category.
Linus has to keep sponsors happy
Meaning that for Linus you are the product, and the advertisers are the real customers.
Again meaning the videos are not made for you, they are made for the advertisers.
LTT doesnt make deep investigative hours-long videos anyway
Oh I almost forgot about him, I blocked his channels years ago. He is an idiot and a shill, and did illegal hidden advertising.
Why anyone would still watch his channels is very strange IMO.
It’s kind of a guilty pleasure for me. I like it in the background sometimes. It’s like watching code blue cam. Cops are occasionally useful bullies but I don’t watch it for the cops. I watch it for the white trash judge judy bullshit. It’s a methed out freak show sometimes. It’s spectacle.
Illegal hidden advertising?
Yes, he would make a paid advertisement camouflaged as a review and never disclose that it was in fact not a review but an advertisement.
He had even set up a scheme to hide the fact, and make it look like the payments were for something else, like consulting.
The guy is absolute scum, and the success of his channel is based on illegal practices.
That is not the reality as I see it. They don't hide the fact that it's a sponsored video (marked as "sponsored video") until the end of the video. They seems mindful to always disclose conflict of interest (everytime framework, the NAS company) and they stopped working with Anker publically and immediately when the eufy camera scandal broke. They seem to hold them selves to a high ethical standard and disclose information even though it paints them in a negative light (they admitted they knew honey was swapping advertiser links but they didn't make it a big story)
Source: I watch around 2-3 LTT videos per week and around 50% of the WAN show podcast
I used to watch less because I couldn't bring myself to click on the god-awful distasteful thumbnails but then I installed "dearrow" and sponsorblock and they are more than tolerable.
OMG the honey fiasco was such an incredible explosion to watch. I never trusted it. I knew it was shady. But I never actually studied it. Just dismissed it as ridiculous shit being shipped everywhere and avoided it. Then the truth came out, LTT and many other got caught with their pants down and looked really bad, and I felt my distrust validated.
So satisfying.
Yeah I thought there is no way it can work effectively and never tried it. I was wondering how they could afford so much advertising. I just expected to be bankrupt. I bet others thought that too. That the shadyness was only about investors.
He only changed practices to be more transparent because he was called out with clear evidence.
I bet he still breaks the rules if it fits his purpose, but since I haven't watched his dishonest channels for years, I cannot really say. But once a fraudster always a fraudster, that's my experience.
Youre forgetting that time they did a scrapyard war which was sponsered by dbrand, in which somebody was constantly in view, playing on a switch with a dbrand skin.
Product placement has always been a thing. I once saw some show on tv where there was a hospital with shiny Apple computers in every scene and I laughed my ass off at how tonedeaf that was.
Not that it makes it any better, but that just seems like typical business practices. Almost everything we watch in America is an advertisement.
No it's not, it's clearly illegal even in USA. Gamers Nexus never did anything like that, or Hardware Unboxed. Those are channels that are renowned for their integrity. Although Hardware unboxed is Australian they are addressing the same market. Except for not being a goofy joke like LTT.
Thanks Steve.
Papa's here
Mr Burke is going to get black bagged.
Whaaaat. US protectionism is purely performative and ineffective? I’m shocked! Surely this administration couldn’t be incompetent?
In the video alot of people said that it is slowing them down
That was a lot of CAPITAL LETTERS
Sweet Tech Jesus! It's 3 and 1/2 hours long.
It’s a really good watch. I’ve put it on while playing some Factorio, so time went by quite quickly
that's an amazing idea, i'll do that.
any other factorio-playing videos for my second monitor? :p
Enjoy: https://youtu.be/Zh4ze5bWLcI
Also most more recent videos by this guy: https://youtube.com/@foldingideas
yeah even I'm not that autistic and I watch videos of people soldering
I dunno, if it were Hbomberguy talking about YouTube plagiarism for four hours I’d watch it.
I hope we get a new video from him this year.
Pace has a really nice series on YouTube ;-)
I usually put it on when I'm playing Alan Wake 2 so I wouldn't shit my pants too hard.