Now this is the first one such article I've ever written, which goes to show just how strange and crazy this pandemic time is. MSI has allegedly been the victim of a well-coordinated theft that managed to divert no less than 40 cargo units holding NVIDIA's flagship GeForce RTX 3090 graphics cards from one of MSI's manufacturing sites in China. These cargo units aren't freight containers, to be clear; they're the sealed cardboard boxes with a manufacturers' seal that are shipped to retailers, with each cargo unit containing (usually) between five and six cards.
The cards are being valued at 2.2 Million Yuan, which is roughly $336,500 in US dollars, when priced at MSRP. That amounts to roughly 224 RTX 3090 GPUs. Of course, these cards will be much more valuable in the black market, since actual availability of the cards in the retail space is so constrained. MSI is offering a reward of 100 thousand Yuan for any information that leads to the recovery of the stolen cargo.