Brazilian distributor Oderco says two pallets of Zotac GeForce RTX 5090 graphics cards disappeared at Guarulhos International Airport in Sao Paulo, and it put the loss at roughly R$2.5 million at cost price. That figure is the only hard number anybody involved has published, because nobody has said how many cards were on the pallets.
The claim rests on a statement the company issued itself. Oderco posted it as a reel on its own Instagram account on October 16, headed "Comunicado Oficial", and tagged the airport operator in the caption.
What the distributor actually said
The statement is short and careful. It says two pallets of Zotac RTX 5090 cards disappeared at the airport, that the goods came to about R$2.5 million at cost price, and that the company had received no answers.
Oderco uses the word "desapareceram", meaning disappeared. It does not say stolen, does not name anyone, and does not allege a crime.
The phrase "a preco de custo", at cost price, matters more than it looks. It means R$2.5 million is what the distributor paid, not what the cards would fetch on a shelf.
What the statement leaves out is most of the case. There is no date of disappearance, no airline, no freight forwarder, no airway bill, and no count of cards.
The airport operator has answered, just not on its own site
GRU Airport, the concessionaire that runs Guarulhos, has since responded to Brazilian press. It has been reported as saying the loss was formally reported to the competent authorities. On October 14, by the same account, it passed on guidance for starting an indemnity process.
That statement has not appeared on the operator's own channels. Its newsroom carries items dated October 8, October 13 and October 17, and none of them mentions the cargo.
The two sides also contradict each other. Oderco has been reported as saying the concessionaire opened no protocol and notified nobody, which is the opposite of what the operator says it did.
Neither account has a document behind it in public. A customs timeline placing the cargo's arrival on September 20 and the failure to locate it on October 14 has been reported by a single outlet and is not confirmed anywhere else.
The dollar figures in circulation are too low
R$2.5 million has been converted into everything from $450,000 to $495,000, and most of those numbers do not work. The Banco Central do Brasil published a reference rate of 5.0564 reais to the dollar on October 19.
At that rate R$2.5 million is about $494,000. On October 16, the day of the statement, the rate was 5.0826, which gives about $492,000.
To arrive at $450,000 the real has to be worth 5.5556 to the dollar, and to reach $470,000 it has to be 5.3191. Neither matches the central bank. The low figure understates the company's own valuation by roughly $44,000.
How many RTX 5090s R$2.5 million buys
This is where the arithmetic falls apart, and the quantity is the fact everyone wants. NVIDIA set the RTX 5090 launch price at $1,999 in its January 2025 announcement, which turns $494,000 into about 247 cards.
Brazilian retail gives a completely different answer. At Kabum, the cheapest RTX 5090 in stock on October 20 was a Palit GameRock OC at R$33,990, and R$2.5 million buys about 73 of those.
An Inno3D RTX 5090 was listed at R$39,999 and an ASUS ROG Edition 20 at R$59,999.99, which work out to 62 and 41 cards. Kabum lists no Zotac RTX 5090 at all, so there is no Brazilian shelf price for the exact brand in the shipment.
The estimate of at least 63 cards that has circulated does not survive a check. Dividing R$2.5 million by 63 gives R$39,683 a card, which is above the cheapest RTX 5090 any Brazilian shopper can buy today.
That is a retail number pretending to be a cost number. R$39,683 is about $7,848, roughly four times NVIDIA's own MSRP, and no distributor pays four times MSRP for stock. The gap between 73 and 247 cards comes down to Brazilian import duty and taxes, which is why the distance between launch MSRPs and real shelf prices makes any conversion of this kind unreliable.
No authority has confirmed anything
Nothing here has been confirmed by anyone with jurisdiction. Brazil's federal police and the Receita Federal, its customs and tax authority, have not commented publicly, and no police report number or inquiry number exists in public.
No airline, ground handler or freight forwarder has been named by anyone, including the distributor. No statement from Zotac appears in any coverage of the case, and its own site blocks automated access, so the silence cannot be read either way.
GPU freight has drawn attention before, as it did when thieves hit NVIDIA-labelled trailers and came away with sand. Buyers have met their own version of the problem, including an RTX 5090 that arrived with its entire PCB missing.
What remains unpublished is the whole middle of the story. Nobody has said how many cards were on the pallets, when they were last accounted for, who was holding them, or whether the case is a theft, a misdelivery or a filing error. Until an authority or the carrier says something on the record, the R$2.5 million figure is one company's valuation of goods it says it cannot find.
Discussion (0)
Be the first to comment.