We've seen our fair share of modified GPUs from China — a region restricted from receiving most high-end cards. These export controls imposed by the The White House have created an underground market where gaming-grade graphics cards are stripped of their internals and put onto custom PCBs designed for AI workloads. AI requires a lot of memory, and despite former flagship GPUs like the RTX 4090 already coming with large memory buffers, it's still not enough for tasks such as running LLMs locally.
The latest to join the line of modded GPUs is the RTX 5090 with a whopping 128 GB of VRAM. Yes, this graphics card most likely has more memory than your entire PC. It's described as a prototype because the modder is using GDDR7X memory that is not yet available on a larger scale, but there's still a "super limited" quantity associated with this, which suggests that more units could be made.
