Samsung-branded 24 Gbit (3 GB) GDDR7 memory chips are being loosely sold in the Chinese retail market. The chips are being sold in OEM packaging meant for PCB pick-and-place machines, although the seller offers to sell these chips on a per-unit basis, priced at RMB ¥72.50, or approximately USD $10 per chip. This opens the door for graphics card memory modders to, in theory, give the GeForce RTX 5090 a 50% memory boost with $160 worth memory chips. An RTX 5090 with 48 GB of memory would accelerate AI models with larger parameter counts than a stock card.

Given that off-brand RTX 5090 cards are being sold in China in board designs meant for commercial AI acceleration farms, this sale opens the door for off-brand RTX 5090 cards with 48 GB memory. Much of the RTX 5090 gray-market in China runs in complete disregard of U.S. export controls that prevent NVIDIA from selling the RTX 5090 in the Chinese domestic market, instead selling the RTX 5090D, a card with nearly identical gaming performance to RTX 5090, but with reduced AI acceleration and blockchain performance.