According to the footage, technicians desolder the cards' GB202 GPU silicon and GDDR7 memory chips and transplant them onto another circuit board fitted with a dual-slot blower cooler. That swap matters because consumer cards use bulky three- and four-slot coolers that blow air sideways, which does not fit the tightly packed racks of a 4U server. A blower design exhausts heat out of the back of the chassis, so many converted cards can sit side by side.

The converted cards are then run through performance and stability testing on open benches, repackaged and shipped to customers, described as likely data centres or AI labs. Tom's Hardware estimates that thousands of cards could be converted each day, with middlemen constantly hunting for RTX 5090 stock to keep the lines fed.

The squeeze on gamers is the visible result. The report says Nvidia has reportedly halted RTX 5090 production, probably to steer silicon towards higher-margin professional cards such as the RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell, and US retail stock has nearly vanished, with custom cards starting at around $8,500 and prices pushed close to $10,000. Back in September 2026, photos shared by HKEPC already showed pallets of boxed retail RTX 5090s being unpacked straight into multi-GPU AI rigs, when listings had climbed past $5,000 against a $1,999 launch price. The conversion factories take that grey-market trade a step further: rather than just buying up cards, they are physically rebuilding them.