A customer who bought a PC with an Nvidia RTX 5090 at a Micro Center in California this week said the store made him sign a declaration that the graphics card would not be resold, given away or taken out of the United States — and scanned his driver license to go with it.
The buyer, a Reddit user posting as Krothic, said he picked up a PowerSpec AI90 prebuilt with an RTX 5090 inside at the Micro Center in Tustin, California. “Apparently the manager required me to fill out this form and scan my driver license,” he wrote. “Said it was a new thing starting just about two days ago. Had no problem doing so but thought it was interesting.”
The single-page form, which Tom’s Hardware identified as an “Advanced Computing Product Purchaser Declaration,” asks the buyer to guarantee the card will be used for personal or business use, that it will not be resold or even given away and that it will remain in the United States. It asks for a home address, a government-issued ID and the intended use of the hardware.
What penalties a buyer would face for breaking the pledge is unclear. But tying the card to an ID would make it easy to trace. In the Reddit comments, other shoppers described similar scrutiny at other stores; one said a manager grilled him to prove he was really a gamer, photo evidence required. Another poster said the same form had turned up at the Columbus, Ohio, store.
The paperwork arrives as Washington tightens the flow of high-end chips. Trump administration policies restrict exports of consumer GPUs to countries like China, where RTX cards carry steep resale prices, and Nvidia has built China-market variants, the RTX 5090D and 5090D V2, in response. The enforcement pressure is real enough: federal prosecutors this week accused a California man of smuggling $300 million in Nvidia chips to China.
Retailers like Micro Center appear to be reacting to that pressure on their own, and other stores may adopt their own measures. In the meantime, AI demand has already pushed prices on PC and console hardware well past what buyers were paying a few years ago.