Hardware
Leaked video shows RTX 5090s dismantled for AI server duty
Footage circulating online appears to show Chinese workshops stripping brand-new Nvidia flagship cards and rebuilding them with blower coolers for dense AI server racks.
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Crunchy.
YESTERDAY, STILL WORTH KNOWING
Leaked footage shows RTX 5090 cards rebuilt for AI servers, Texas suspends 17 data centre permits, the UK funds an AI biosecurity lab, and Proton hosts a camera map.
Graphics cards and data centres under strain
Leaked footage circulating on X reportedly shows industrial-scale Chinese workshops dismantling brand-new Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 graphics cards, including Founders Edition, and rebuilding them for AI server use. The card is not officially sold in China, yet the video shows lines stacked with retail boxes from multiple board partners. Technicians desolder the GB202 GPU silicon and GDDR7 memory chips and transplant them onto boards with dual-slot blower coolers, which exhaust heat out of the chassis back so converted cards can sit side by side in tightly packed 4U server racks. Tom's Hardware estimates thousands of cards could be converted daily. Nvidia has reportedly halted RTX 5090 production, probably to steer silicon towards higher-margin professional cards, and US stock has nearly vanished, with custom cards starting around $8,500 and prices pushed close to $10,000 against a $1,999 launch price.
Texas has suspended construction permits for 17 data centre projects and shut its STEERS auto-approval portal, run by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, after it kept approving permits for a month past Governor Greg Abbott's September 2026 pause during an audit of roughly 1,800 projects. Watchdog groups FracTracker Alliance and Public Citizen exposed the continued approvals, including ones for OpenAI and Amazon. The suspended permits cover stormwater construction, the ground-clearing work that is a vital early step, making the suspensions a meaningful brake. New York's year-long ban on data centres larger than 50 megawatts is also in force, and Amazon dropped four Northern Virginia plans after community backlash.
AI safety, setbacks and surveillance
The UK government has launched the AI Biosecurity Lab, committing £100 million (about $134 million) to detect biological threats and accelerate vaccines and treatments. OpenAI is providing £100 million in model credits, Anthropic £100 million in credits, and Google DeepMind will collaborate while supplying access to its Gemini models. AI minister Kanishka Narayan called it a major new global institution.
TechCrunch's running list of failed AI products includes Relay, an automation tool that shut down in August, and Character.ai, which filed for bankruptcy. S&P Global Market Intelligence says about 42% of AI initiatives are ultimately abandoned, and even OpenAI, Apple and Microsoft have had setbacks, from the rolled-back ChatGPT redesign to the delayed Siri and Recall. Separately, Proton AG, the Swiss company behind Proton Mail, now hosts a worldwide map of over 300,000 Flock licence plate recognition cameras, built by researcher Joshua Michael from leaked data despite Flock's cease-and-desist. The map reflects November 2025 data, so it is a snapshot rather than a live view.