WTF?! It seems that if you have the money to buy a pre-built RTX 5090 PC from Micro Center, and there's one in stock, you'll also have to sign a declaration promising not to export the flagship graphics card. It's unclear exactly how enforceable this form is, though, and whether it would actually stop people who are selling the chips to China and elsewhere.
Redditor Krothic writes that they recently bought a PowerSpec Ai90 prebuilt PC packing an RTX 5090. The store manager informed them that buying the PC required that they fill in a form and have their drivers license scanned, connecting their name to their purchase.
After the section requiring details such as name, photo ID, and phone number, the form states that the person must be buying the PC for their own personal or business use in the US, "or I have accurately identified the actual end user above."
The next point specifies that the product will remain in the United States, and will not be exported, reexported, transferred, resold, supplied, or anything else that causes the PC to leave the US to any destination, for any reason.
These days, getting hold of an RTX 5090 usually means handing over more than $7,000, with at least one special edition model priced at $11,229. In many cases, it's cheaper to buy an entire pre-built PC featuring the GPU than to buy the card individually – and you obviously get all the other components as part of the price.
With its 32GB of VRAM, the RTX 5090 is considered as much of an AI-focused card as a gaming one, if not more so. As such, the standard RTX 5090 is restricted from export to mainland China under US export controls; Nvidia made separate 5090 D and 5090 D V2 versions for the Chinese market.
The Micro Center manager said the process had been in place for the past two days. There are certainly a lot of questions surrounding it. What if the buyer decides to sell the system or its GPU second-hand years later and that person then sells it overseas? What if the system is stolen and ends up abroad?
One comment on the thread also claims that Micro Center also won't sell an RTX 5090 to a customer if they've ever bought one in the past. Another user said the same thing happened to them.
Ultimately, this all feels like another reason why people aren't going to want to buy an RTX 5090, or a system containing one, right now. And, once again, it's AI's fault.