$470K in RTX 5090 GPUs Vanish at Brazil’s Busiest Airport
Distributor Oderço says airport officials refuse to share security footage of the missing Zotac shipment.
Two pallets of Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 graphics cards disappeared inside São Paulo/Guarulhos International Airport, according to the Brazilian hardware distributor expecting the shipment. The cargo, valued at R$2.5 million (roughly $470,000), never left the airport grounds.
Oderço Distribuidora president Oderço Matos said his company went public after authorities provided no explanation and refused to hand over security footage. The firm has imported computer hardware for 18 years. Matos called the incident unprecedented in the company’s history. No one has been arrested. No tracking data on the specific Zotac-branded units has been released.
Brazilian Federal Police and the Federal Revenue Service have not issued statements regarding the missing goods. Airport officials declined to cooperate with local media inquiries or with Oderço directly. Technically, law enforcement has not confirmed a theft occurred, though the physical inventory is gone.
Guarulhos processes more than 40 million passengers annually, ranking as Latin America’s busiest aviation hub. Cargo theft targeting high-value electronics remains a persistent problem at major Brazilian logistics nodes. A 2023 report by the National Association of Cargo Transport Insurance estimated that robberies and thefts cost Brazilian logistics firms billions of reais each year, with airports and highway corridors serving as primary chokepoints.
The timing aligns with severe global shortages of top-tier GPUs. While the RTX 5090 targets consumers rather than enterprise AI clusters, its architecture makes it a stopgap for smaller machine-learning operations unable to secure dedicated data center silicon. Recent speculation suggested Nvidia might halt production entirely. The company later confirmed manufacturing continues, but retail prices surged past initial launch figures within days. Street values for single units routinely exceed $3,000 in secondary markets.
Matos stated the company wants whoever took the hardware to return it.
