We have found the missing graphics cards from AMD and NVIDIA, which can be bought almost as gifts in China, apparently by the same assemblers that manufacture for big brands.

Where are the graphics cards? This is the question of the last hours and the answer that comes to mind is the mining of cryptocurrencies. The reason that the prices of NVIDIA and AMD are going up, at least on Amazon, so that prices go up to the beast is that there is no stock anywhere, because the cryptocurrency mining farms take them to shovels. Well, there is something that does not fit in this story and we are going to tell you where the graphics cards are. They are in China.

Yes, they're in China, and I'm sorry to say, but no, they're not in mining farms. We've been investigating the situation and decided to check out the Chinese equivalent of Amazon, Alibaba. We started searching and it turns out that you can indeed buy graphics cards there, and quite a few at that. For example, the first case is the Gallardo GTX 1060 6GB , which is sold as a mining card, but with all the necessary connectors. If we buy more than 100 units, each one will cost us $145, but not only that, they manufacture 1.000 units per month, which is a considerable amount.

This seemed good to us, but we looked further and found another seller offering NVIDIA GTX 1060/1070/1080 and AMD RX 570/480/470 cards for between $100 and $600, depending on the model. The interesting thing is that they produce 10.000 units per day, not per month or week, but per day. However, if you want a specific model, such as the KFA2 GTX 1060 HoF , you can find it for $426. Keep in mind, though, that it's sold by a manufacturer other than KFA2, so don't look for the company name on it. If you buy more than ten units, each one costs $394, and there are 99.999 graphics cards available. Interesting, isn't it?

But there's more. AMD's RX Vega cards are absurdly priced, and not just now, but for weeks now—well, since their launch. In China, these graphics cards are being manufactured at a rate of 1.000 units per day, and the RX Vega 64 and RX Vega 56 are selling for between $200 and $250, with a minimum purchase of five. There are other prices and manufacturers; these are just examples.

Many Chinese companies buy GPUs directly to manufacture for third parties and take advantage of these designs to sell their graphics cards themselves, cheaper and with the same quality as those that we can find in the rest of the world. There is no trick, or anything strange, it is quite common, indeed, if we looked for other components, exactly the same would happen.

So why these prices? Well, to this we can no longer answer you and we would like to, but it seems like a market regulation strategy or an attempt to discredit the mining of cryptocurrencies, who knows. But come on, it will be because in China they do not have stock to bore the gaming graphics card that we want and at really succulent prices. Yes, the downside is that we cannot buy directly from Alibaba, but come on, if we could ...