We've been investigating the Nvidia GPU black market in China for the last three weeks, and this is our biggest story yet. And also, I may or may not have been detained for an extended period of time for questioning at customs by one of the two governments involved in relation to getting this story, but I've been advised not to talk about that today. Also, we might upset Nvidia again. So, this story is pretty crazy because we found and spoke to smugglers, middlemen, and users of so-called AIG GPUs, which have been banned by the United States government for sale into China. And in a world first, we got several of these people involved in the chain of fueling this black market of GPUs to go on camera and talk about either selling them or using the cards. As recently as a day ago, the US government arrested two Chinese nationals for smuggling GPUs past US borders for export into China to be sold on the black market. We are making a fulllength movie about all of this and we need your help. In this story, we spent 2 weeks traveling over 2,300 m or 3,700 km inside China to talk to those in the know. We then spent a week in Taiwan to find intermediary companies. We worked with this guy in Hu Jo known as Mr. Five and we asked him this question. Nvidia turn a blind eye. This was the exact same idiomatic proverb given by two other middlemen in Shenzhen. Do you think Nvidia knows? Do they try to stop it? They agreed to let us record the conversation but said we couldn't show their faces. Just don't can't show their face. Oh, okay. Yeah. And our company name in Hong Kong. We visited Dr. Vinci Chowo's handbuilt server at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. A user and purchaser of GPUs which are now export controlled. I mean, but it's supposed to be banned, right? Yes. But you can just buy at retail in a in a store. As I said, it's not illegal to buy them. But I guess what surprised me is how easy it is to buy them. The right price. We met with a dealer of smuggled GPUs in Huache, who told us just how easy it is to get these supposedly banned GPUs in China by walking us across the street to introduce us to his suppliers. Does he need to make any trips to SCG to buy stuff that we could potentially go with him for? You know what I mean? Like to like if he has any need to go to Saiga to buy stuff, would he be interested in us following him to accomp like accompany him? If you could find a soft way to present that, I guess his cousin made tea and told us about the integrated circuit supply business. which fuels memory modules to people like this guy, brother John. Okay. Hey, cool. Brother John takes defective Nvidia PCBs and extracts the GPU while adding new memory modules to create high VRAM capacity GPUs like 4090s and possibly soon 5090s that not only aren't supposed to be sold to China according to the US, but aren't even official SKUs from Nvidia. And they're in high demand for AI servers. So, what did he say? Sometimes people buy like 10 or 20 at a time or something. Uh he gets a 10 or 20 orders at a time. Yeah. For AI running like language uh running models or we were also guided around Tonguang by a guy who called himself the Chinese M&M. So we then realized the best way to understand how GPUs get in and how this black market works would be to buy a GPU which was smuggled into China. So we wired thousands of dollars. Stephen. Yes. Stephen. Yeah. How's it going? Oh my god. All right. You really got to help you here. Yeah. So, I've got $3,289 going out and they're bank. You'll find out if that worked in the fulllength movie we're making for this story. No more anonymous sources say that you see in all the big publications. We spent months finding people to go on record and on camera. So, this story is special, but to finish the story, we need your help. We're launching our own version of a Kickstarter that we've linked below to help fund our production budget. This movie has a release date, August 15th, so it's coming out in just a week. To make this as good as we can, we want to pull all resources to focus on only this. This will help fund our existing research, travel, staff, and production costs thus far totaling about $100,000 now. Most of which has spent months and months of time across multiple team members researching, finding leads, and training for this trip. Our backer rewards include exclusive benefits like additional footage and bonus videos only for backer tiers, very small group live stream Q&A sessions with me where you can ask about the project, our testing or even jobseeking advice in the industry if you want and more like behind the scenes videos with the production and research teams for this unique story. All of these tiers are named in a way that's themed around smuggling. And so the highest tier here is the kingpin which includes Kingpin KPX thermal paste. That's right. I contacted the actual kingpin to provide kingpin thermal paste for our kingpin backer tier. We're also launching this brand new turn a blind eye t-shirt referencing the Chinese idiom that our contacts kept uttering when we asked if Nvidia was aware of the circumvention of export controls for sale of its GPUs into China and the text is written in traditional Chinese characters. It's read top down, right to left, and it feels sort of like a skyline from Hong Kong inspired by it. This is handmade art by Andrew on the team showing one open and one closed eye with cyberpunk style Bladeunneresque theming to fit the Hong Kong part of the trip. Our highest tier also includes a credit in the video if you bought on or before August 14th and includes a watercolor painting of the Hong Kong city skyline on canvas that my mom actually painted based on one of the photos I took. We need your help more than ever to make this story a reality. Some of our stretch goals include publishing the most complete timeline of GPU bans on the internet so far using our website and posting the article ad free. Another includes publishing large parts of our research document as another article free of thirdparty ads with another stretch goal eliminating any thirdparty direct ad sales from the movie itself to restrict the movie to only have GN store ads and of course the usual YouTube AdSense. Our research document for this investigation is already over 450 pages and has been collected over a period of four months now, making this our most expensive and extensive video yet, but also we think the most important. We want this to be the most comprehensive and interesting piece looking into this peculiar world where a black market now isn't just drugs and guns, but is also video cards that at one point could have been perceived for just gaming. We're launching the video on August 15th. It has a firm release date and all that remains now is how much we can polish it and refine it. We're trying to hire drone pilots for additional shots. We're working on getting custom music made by Matt Heathy of Trivia fame and by Aaron Paulie from of Mice and Men among other tracks. And we're hoping to pause production of several other video projects so we can use the budget to fully focus on making this our best investigation yet. It's something that GN is uniquely capable of doing in this space. So, we want to make sure it's good and provide something that you haven't seen before. The digital rewards are only included in the backer tiers, like the wallpapers and the bonus videos, all themed around GPU smuggling in the titling. Those are only available for a few weeks. Most of the physical items will remain available on the store after or individually if you'd like to spend less and still support us while just getting one or two items. The whole story is fascinating and took us all around Asia and Nvidia has been incredibly sensitive about this subject. Months ago, there was a company talking about how GPUs were being smuggled in with lobsters. Nvidia responded defensively, stating that it'd be better if American companies would focus on innovation rather than making up tall tales about sensitive electronics with lobsters. And we looked into that, too. But I got to save some things for the video. Uh, it's interesting further that if you really think about it, a lot of the cards that are banned for sale into China by the US government, they're made in China. So, they can make them, but technically the US says that the companies that have them made are not allowed to sell them to China where they're made. And so, we looked into that, too, because it's it's always possible for a card to fall off the back of a truck on its way to a port or something. And that was something we were curious about. The GPU silicon isn't made there. That's made in Taiwan. But the assembly and the making of all the other parts like the shrouds, the PCBs, most the VRM components, that tends to be done in China. Most of that is in Ho Jo and Shenzhen, which we went to. Speaking of Taiwan, we also hopped over there to spend time speaking to people in the GPS supply chain for the story. The whole story is just interesting because it's really bizarre and dystopian and this sort of it's like a future that we live in now. You'd see it in a movie or something where normally a black market is for drugs or guns or something that you'd think of as really bad in some capacity. Something you're definitely not supposed to be able to get, but you can through these illicit means. And yet the people we spoke to as part of this story who are involved in GPU supply into China where according to the US government they're not supposed to be able to get a lot of these cards, the people we worked with referred to it as a black market for GPUs or sometimes a gray market. And at the end of all of this, you have something where you just take a step back and look at it and it's like these are video cards that feasibly you could buy for playing video games. A lot of them 4090s, 5090s. Yes, there's bands of Blackwell B100, B200, H100, those A100, the high-end AI GPUs or data center GPUs that wouldn't be for gaming, those are of course on the list, too. But the fact remains that cards which we've reviewed and benchmarked in, I don't know, Final Fantasy are so valuable that they get smuggled into another country for sale. And of course, it's for things outside of gaming, but it could be gaming, too. And when you look at it through that lens of this is a thing that we all in our audience know from just a hobby of PC building and it is so obscenely valuable outside of that hobby that people are willing to risk some kind of fines or potentially detainment or maybe even jail getting it out of places it's not supposed to get out of because it's so valuable to then sell it somewhere it's not supposed to be sold. And that makes it fascinating to us. That's why we covered this. So, uh, it's a big adventure. Tannon went with me for this. He was the one on the camera and running the audio for that. So, just for context, normally as far as like how important and crazy this story was, uh, someone on the camera team would go with me for that, but due to other scheduling conflicts and how kind of down to the last minute this came across the wire, they weren't able to go. Tannon is a writer. He writes content. He had zero experience using like a studio camera and audio gear before we went. And so Vitali, Andrew, and Mike spent four weeks doing extensive training with Tannon to get him ready and prepped for this trip. And he went with me and we shot it all. Uh he spent three weeks in the field with me for his first real project. And it it came together great. We're really happy with it. So uh he killed it. the team killed it on training him and now we're in the editing stages where myself and the rest of the team were getting it across the line to finalize it. Really crazy story though where the team is heavily involved here at all stages. I mean uh on Tannon's side he went from zero camera experience to having to do this trip and did well with it. Uh Ben on the team is the one who put together hundreds of pages of research. She has I think it's over like 140 hours in this project now just researching and helping me figure out who do we talk to, where do we need to go when we're in China. Uh on my side, I spent a lot of time studying Chinese so I could just use the right words having these conversations cuz like believe it or not, uh it never came up in my tutoring sessions how to say black market. And I I really felt like I would have had to explain that if I had asked. So, uh, that's where I spend some of my time in addition to the research and the planning and all that stuff, logistics. Uh, but we're excited about it. And in the meantime, to help us finalize things, please head over to our page and support our project. Tiers include new shirt designs like our blind eye t-shirt, our blacklisted t-shirt that I was wearing in this video, and our GPU paper launch shirt. We also have GPU backplate stickers and side panel stickers that we've designed like this one that says black market in Chinese characters with a Nexus Smuggling Company label. We sized it to fit most modern GPU back plates and fit that sort of cyberpunk dystopian theme for your build. That's in addition to digital wallpapers, exclusive Q&A videos, and more. This video is pretty unique for GN. We've done a few of these now where I don't know if you think about our three-hour tariffs deep dive. We learned from that process and that format, and we're continuing to iterate on the format and apply it here. So, that's what we're trying to do again, but keep improving on it. Uh, really fun stuff. We're best known, I think, for the benchmarks and reviews out of the things that we do, but these are becoming more common. We were able to do that because of your support. This stuff's incredibly expensive, both in time and just actual cost. Uh, I mean, again, we spent 3 weeks out of the country to produce this. So, and again, we've got a firm launch date on that video. So, it's going to happen. It's just a matter of how much we can polish it and continue to refine it uh in these last two weeks or so of production. So, hit the links in the description below to help us out. Visit that page. We could really use it on this one more than anything we've done in the past. And as always, subscribe for more. Make sure to set a calendar reminder for the 15th. We're going to be launching the video then. Uh, and in the meantime, check back as always for other content. and we'll see you all next