No, half a million GeForce RTX 30 series GPUs were not lost in shipment and now found

There is a news story gaining a bit of traction claiming that 500,000 GeForce RTX 30 series graphics cards had gone missing during transit, and have now been found in an unlabeled shipping container in South Korea. There is even a supposed quote from Nvidia on the matter, explaining the situation to shareholders. The only problem is, none of it actually happened.

That is a bit of a buzzkill, because suddenly finding half a million missing Ampere GPUs could help alleviate the frustration related to the lack of supply (compared to demand). It's now been more than three months since the first consumer Ampere part released to retail, the GeForce RTX 3080, and it remains hard to find in stock by a first-party seller. Same goes for the cards that have come after it (GeForce RTX 3090, 3070, and 3060 Ti, in that order).

Original reporting on the supposedly missing GPUs traces back to Geeknetic.es, which according to a Google translation of the text, wrote that an employee at a Samsung subsidiary port warehouse in South Korea noticed that stacks of boxes with Nvidia's logo stamped on them were not listed on any of the port's records.

It goes on to state that the employee had himself been trying to buy a GeForce RTX 30 series graphics card to no avail, and seeing the boxes of cards "only added to my frustration of not getting one."

Pictures of the boxes in a shipping container made the article seem convincing, save for the fact that half a million GPUs is a rather large amount of inventory to go missing—I imagine if something like that ever happened, Nvidia would be ultra-diligent in tracking down the lost cards.

After the news started to spread, however, the article's author added an update saying, "This is a fake news story created and published on December 28 in celebration of the Holy Innocents Day in Spain. The content of it is false and has been created with a satirical humorous purpose. We hope you had fun reading it."

Apparently December 28 in Spain is somewhat akin to April Fools' Day, in which it is common for false news stories to be posted, usually with a humorous slant.

That said, if you happen to work at a port warehouse, do us DIY system builders a solid and see if any unmarked shipping containers are housing boxes of Ryzen 5000 series CPUs.