It's a bit of a tumultuous time to be a gamer at the moment, especially for those who are looking for new equipment, such as an Nvidia or AMD graphics card, or even a new-gen console. With tech shortages expected to go on until possibly 2023, the surrounding community is finding itself leaving stores and online shops empty-handed, physically and metaphorically, as products become difficult to procure, unless people wish to pay hiked prices. What gamers and PC enthusiasts do not need, therefore, is more bad news about the state of GPUs, but sadly more, rather serious, problems have occurred.
According to a recent report, which references a blog post, a shipment of Nvidia graphics cards have been stolen during a truck heist, which took part in California just a few days ago. It's said that a shipment of 30-series GPUs were taken, each with an estimated retail value of between $330 and $1,960 US. The truck was en-route from San Francisco when it was set upon before it could reach the distribution center. This information was confirmed by EVGA product manager, Jacob Freeman, who has urged people to contact the company if they have any information about the stolen hardware.
While there's no exact figure on how many cards were taken, or which specific models are missing, the report concludes that, given the average retail value stated, it's likely that Nvidia RTX 3090 GPUs were part of the lot stolen, as well possibly some RTX 3060s. At the time of writing, there doesn't appear to be any information on who may have been involved or the whereabouts of the products, but Freeman has warned people against purchasing any graphics card that may have been involved in the heist. He adds that customers can check the serial numbers to see whether it is a stolen item or not.
This is also not the first time a bunch of Nvidia products have been taken. Back in December 2020, $30,000 worth of RTX 3090s were lifted from a Chinese factory. It seems that high-end GPUs are in such demand that people are willing to turn to desperate measures in order to obtain them. It's also interesting that both incidents occurred not that long before Christmas.
This is certainly not what shoppers want to hear, especially at this time of year. With graphics card prices already going up in parts of Europe, there is an ongoing crisis in the tech world that is not only affecting companies like Nvidia, but customers as well, and moments like this are making it so much worse.
Source: PC Gamer, EVGA forums