Micro Center requires photo ID and signed no-export pledge to buy Nvidia RTX 5090 gaming GPU — buyer forced to sign declaration disclosing install location and promise GPU will remain in the US
(Image credit: Nvidia)
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- Overall not a good idea. Highly invasive and likely illegal. Will leave it to the lawyers (full disclosure, I am not a lawyer) to battle this one out. What is that saying about "The road to hell....."? Reply
- This is only partially new. They have for a very long time required id to purchase items that were in limit quantity. The first time I saw it was back when people were mining bit coin. They even went to a lottery system when scalpers started to pay homeless to be in line for days. So first you had to get lucky and then you could only buy a 1 GPU every 30 days. Other than the export part which is silly they likely can require ID. Places like costco require id to get a membership that you must sign and agree to even enter the store. Reply
- > re3eyul said:
- I rarely buy from Micro Center due to their odd purchasing requirements. This is a perfect example. Reply
- > TechieTwo said:
- > TechieTwo said:
- Customs will be very happy with their 10 new 5090. If you fill out the import paperwork correctly it will immediately be flagged and they will confiscate it. Even before AI they were really good at finding fraudulent paperwork so if try to hide it they will still take all your 5090 and put you in jail for a while. This is partially why they changed the laws so you can not ship stuff from china without any import paperwork...pretending it was worth less than $200. Reply
- > TechieTwo said:
- Not for nothing, but there is approximately a 100% chance these were MADE in China. Reply
- Purchasing a 5090 in a US store and then flipping it to China for a profit -- is this a thing people are doing now? I suppose it makes sense given just how absurd 5090 prices are and how prevalent scalping is. I doubt most buyers are using them for gaming or even digital media creation. Can one of those 5090s seized by US customs be purchased? I hope they're not being destroyed. Reply
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A Micro Center customer who bought an RTX 5090 in Tustin, California, was required to sign an Advanced Computing Product Purchaser Declaration form, which bars exporting the GPU, before being approved to purchase the GPU. According to u/Krothic’s post on the r/Microcenter subreddit, they bought a PowerSpec AI90 Workstation with an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X CPU, an RTX 5090 Founders Edition GPU, 64GB DDR5-6000 RAM, and a 2TB SSD from the retailer and were surprised when the manager required them to sign the form, which you can see in the post below.
Form for 5090’s>
from r/Microcenter
The form requires a prospective RTX 5090 buyer to give their full legal name, residential or business address, government-issued photo ID, phone & email, actual end user (if different from purchaser), location where the product will be installed, and its intended end use. It also says, “NO EXPORT - NO EXCEPTIONS. Micro Center will not sell this product to a purchaser who intends to export, reexport, resell, transfer, or otherwise cause it to leave the United States, regardless of destination.” Micro Center did not mention why it recently began requiring the form, especially as other commenters in the Reddit post said that they weren’t required to do so previously. However, one other person said in the thread that they had to fill out a similar but longer form when they bought a GPU from Central Computers last summer.
Even though GPUs that have the processing power of RTX 4090s or higher were first banned for export to China in November 2023, U.S. authorities only started seriously clamping down on smuggling operations recently. One major arrest, so far, is that of three Supermicro employees, including its co-founder, Yih-Shyan “Wally” Liaw, who are suspected of illicitly shipping $2.5 billion worth of Nvidia hardware to China. There have also been anecdotal reports of people buying used RTX 5090s in the U.S. en masse, arriving with testing rigs built into their cars and paying sellers in cash.
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It’s unclear how these Micro Center forms will stop or prevent the smuggling of RTX 5090 GPUs, especially as they don’t list the serial number of the GPU being sold. The policy is possibly a deterrent for those who casually purchase high-end equipment like this and sell it to another buyer at a higher price, whether that buyer plans to use it locally or export it illegally.
We have reached out to Micro Center for comment and will update as necessary.
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Jowi Morales is a tech enthusiast with years of experience working in the industry. He’s been writing with several tech publications since 2021, where he’s been interested in tech hardware and consumer electronics.
<<Removed by moderator>>just messaged my contact there , and yup $3k a pop. Reply
I rarely buy from Micro Center due to their odd purchasing requirements. This is a perfect example.a case of "oh you don't want my money, Oki" Reply
I rarely buy from Micro Center due to their odd purchasing requirements. This is a perfect example.Unless it's something I can find cheaper elsewhere, and do not need it same day, I always go to Microcenter. Not sure what you find odd about purchasing requirements. Reply
I rarely buy from Micro Center due to their odd purchasing requirements. This is a perfect example.What odd purchasing requirements, exactly? Reply