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Comment by mongrelion | Hacker News Reader

I recommend everyone to watch GamersNexus' documentary on the NVIDIA AI GPU black market. They explain how companies like DeepSeek can get a hold of chips that are otherwise banned by the US government to export to China

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1H3xQaf7BFI

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I was just selling my RTX 4090 on Ebay recently and got a ton of bids from Chinese accounts. The winner ($2,325) had Australia set as the country on their profile, but a Chinese name on the account, and the order shipping address was to a different Chinese name (to a regular single-family house in Delaware). Most bidders straight up had China as their profile country.

So my 4090 (24 GB) is probably going to get turned into a 48/96 GB VRAM frankenstein in a Chinese chop shop. I haven't watched the full 3.5 hour documentary you linked but from the first few minutes, it seems quite interesting. And covers this exact thing.

Edit: Again, I checked the address, it was a house, not a freight forwarder warehouse. And if it was actually going to AU, the forwarder would be on the west coast in CA/WA, not east coast (had another order go to Thailand with a forwarder in SF. And Miami is the big hub for South America). For legit freight forwarding they also wouldn't have different names on the account & shipping address. As the parent comment's YT video describes, these are often just normal Chinese-Americans or international students who do this to make a bit of extra money.

People with Chinese names do sometimes live in Delaware.

With their profile in Australia?

While this is likely what the op was suggesting,

I would like to point out that in Australia and NZ, it can be a massive pain to find someone who will ship internationally.

Normally this is for things like Amazon US, and other US-based companies. There are services[1][2] that advertise virtual postal addresses in your purchase-country where they’ll box and ship it to you.

So yes, a Chinese name based in Australia with a shipping address in the US isn’t immediately a red flag. Lots of Chinese in Australia and NZ, and lots of people here like to use shipping services like this.

1. https://www.nzpost.co.nz/tools/you-shop

2. https://www.choice.com.au/shopping/online-shopping/buying-on... (Scroll to bottom)

> Chinese name based in Australia with a shipping address in the US isn’t immediately a red flag

And a good thing, too, or I would be concerned about posting that I knew it was going somewhere forbidden.

And Australia; ~5% of Australia's population is Chinese origin.

Do they all live at the same address of the overseas freight forwarder too? I've sold stuff on eBay to someone in Europe who had me ship to the same address in Delaware. I was confused so I googled the address and turned up the freight forwarding service.

This has happened to me a couple of times with eBay sales.

Is it safe to transact with people who use freight forwarders in your experience? Do you lose any protections?

Out of fear, in my cases, I cancelled the auctions.

On second thought though, I wonder if it's actually the buyer using the service that is more at risk (introduction of 3rd party, more complex delivery, probably impossible to return, etc)

What's not safe for you? They pay you the money, then you send the item to the address they ask. You already got the money! Cancelling the sale because the buyer wants to spend a bit less on shipping seems like an awful thing to do. International shipping gets ridiculously expensive, so combining multiple small packages into one shipment makes perfect sense.

Sometimes. But the vast proportion live in China. Like 9000 vs 1.4 Billion.

If you are selling in the US, and an account with a primary address overseas buys your item and uses a US shipping address, you are likely shipping to a package forwarder. These services are common because many people and businesses in the US only ship to the US.

I have my eBay account set this way, and I still get bids from overseas accounts -- I always Google the shipping address, 100% of the time it has been a package forwarder.

> So my 4090 (24 GB) is probably going to get turned into a 48/96 GB VRAM frankenstein in a Chinese chop shop

Cool, though. Where can I buy one? :p

last I checked you can find these cards with more VRAM on aliexpress and ebay.

Same!

I got a work laptop stolen (in my favorite bag, which they don’t make anymore) and found out from the police that there’s a chain from fences for drug addicts to criminal organizations in the Middle East. They’ve found American hardware there a number of times. Little harder to steal a desktop graphics card in general, but breakins happen.

Can't they do it here? or will the authorities go after these kind of upgrades?

Yeah, or just jump unto Alibaba and Ebay from any neighboring country to China and see for yourself how easy it would be to buy a GPU then transport yourself ~500m and now be within China with these GPUs.

I think you are overestimating the ease of getting hopper/blackwell from alibaba or ebay.

Yeah? Tried Ebay Singpore as a first try, seems like there is plenty of stuff: https://www.ebay.com.sg/sch/i.html?_nkw=gpu+blackwell

Edit: just for fun (and actual neighbor of China), tried Ebay India too, seems not-impossible: https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=blackwell+gpu&_sacat=0&...

> and actual neighbor of China), tried Ebay India too

Eh, you'd have to cross the Himalayas and go through what is kind of a military zone.

Kazakhstan and Vietnam are more suitable candidates, but neither has actually good infrastructure connectivity to China.

One of the keys being, of course, that the Chinese government doesn't care. Yeah it might require mules bringing the GPUs into China but once they're in China, no one is breaking any laws. Of course DeepSeek is using these GPUs! It's not illegal for them to do so!

Chinese government recently banned Chinese companies from buying Nvidia chips.

Yup, the change was in the news in September

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/09/china-blocks-sal...

That’s not a ban of nvidia chips though. It’s for a few of the biggest companies, and is specifically telling them not to buy a made-for-china SKU:

> The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) told companies, including ByteDance and Alibaba, this week to end their testing and orders of the RTX Pro 6000D, Nvidia’s tailor-made product for the country, according to three people with knowledge of the matter

The US government doesn't really care either.

We have someone in the comments section talking about how they encountered a bunch of suspicious bidders on their GPU auction. That's not what happens when people care about being potentially investigated for breaking export rules.

> suspicious bidders

A person with a Chinese name living in Delaware? Gasp.

Why would the Chinese government care about US export restrictions in the first place?

Where does nvidia manufacture those chips?

The Republic of a China, not the People's Republic of China. You might not legally be able to identify the difference in your jurisdiction.

Right. I am a TSMC shareholder. I know this story.

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