The GeForce RTX 5090 is already at the pinnacle of the best graphics cards. However, Shenzhen Suqiao Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd., a Chinese OEM/ODM, has reportedly made it even more powerful by outfitting the Blackwell flagship with 96GB of memory, 3X more than the original. The company is already selling these modified GeForce RTX 5090 96GB on Alibaba for $3888, 35% less than the vanilla GeForce RTX 5090 in the U.S.

You can say whatever you want about China, but you cannot deny that factories there have produced some of the most interesting modified graphics cards, including the GeForce RTX 5080 32GB, the GeForce RTX 4090 48GB, and the GeForce RTX 3090 48GB. While some of these projects are fueled by pure curiosity, most of them are a result of the recent AI boom that has stimulated Chinese factories to think outside the box and give existing and even past graphics cards a memory upgrade so consumers can repurpose them for AI workloads. While we have seen a fair share of absurd rumors, such as the GeForce RTX 5090 128GB, the conjuration of the GeForce RTX 5090 96GB seems more plausible from a technical standpoint, and there is precedent for a Blackwell-based graphics card with 96GB of memory.

Before diving into the GeForce RTX 5090 96GB, it is worth noting that the Alibaba listing is from Suqiao, a Chinese manufacturer with over 10 years of experience making graphics cards, motherboards, and servers. So it is not a random Chinese chop shop but rather an established OEM/ODM, which lends some credence to the existence of the GeForce RTX 5090 96GB. Needless to say, the Alibaba listing is full of questionable specifications, such as GDDR6X memory or memory speeds of 14 Gbps.

The RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell, which has 96GB of GDDR7 memory, uses the same GB202 silicon as the GeForce RTX 5090, but with more enabled Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs). Therefore, a 96GB configuration is possible on GB202; however, the GeForce RTX 5090 96GB likely uses a custom PCB, allowing the manufacturer to install the memory chips in clamshell mode, which doubles the total memory on the PCB. The vendor could either procure the GB202 silicon individually or extract it from mainstream GeForce RTX 5090 graphics cards and reball it onto the custom PCB.

Even in clamshell mode, with memory pads on both sides of the PCB, there are only 32 of them. The RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell has 32 GDDR7 chips, each 24Gb (3GB) in capacity. The problem we have with the GeForce RTX 5090 96GB that raises a red flag about its authenticity is the mention of GDDR6X. Micron only produced GDDR6X memory chips in 16 Gb (2GB), so the maximum capacity would be 48GB in clamshell mode. Plus, GDDR6X operates between 19 Gbps and 24 Gbps, much higher than the listed 14 Gbps, which corresponds to standard GDDR6.

Modified firmware and software-level hacks are necessary to run Nvidia graphics cards with modified memory capacity. For instance, the GeForce RTX 4090 48GB was possible because modders modified Nvidia's firmware to get these graphics cards running. However, rumors on the street suggest that a leaked firmware for the GeForce RTX 5090 has been available for a few months, which could explain why we are starting to see these GeForce RTX 5090 96GB graphics cards surface.

Suqiao listed the GeForce RTX 5090 96GB for $3,888, significantly lower than other Alibaba merchants who have it closer to $5,900. For reference, custom GeForce RTX 5090 graphics cards start at $6,000 in the U.S. market. After the latest price hikes, Nvidia is selling the RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell for $16,000, although it can go up to $17,999, depending on which variant you pick up. If the GeForce RTX 5090 96GB is real, even at $6,000, it would be a steal for anyone running AI models.

The IO500 Committee has removed storage subsystems based on Sugon's ParaStor F9000 all-flash storage systems from its Production IO500 list, as the system does not meet reproducibility requirements, which include sufficient architecture details and general availability, as noticed by Glenn K. Lockwood. The machines powered by ParaStor F9000 storage systems have been moved to the Research IO500 list and are still among the world's highest-performing storage devices; meanwhile, Intel's Aurora has retaken the top spot on the Production list.

"After further review, the Sugon ISC26 submission has been transferred from the Production List to the Research List, as it did not satisfy the criteria for the highest level of Reproducibility due to the lack of widely available architectural details and limited general availability of the file system," a statement by the IO500 Committee reads. "Accordingly, the previous #1 position on the Production and Production 10-Client lists (Argonne’s DAOS system) has been restored."

IO500 is essentially the storage counterpart to TOP500, but rather than ranking supercomputers by computational performance, it ranks HPC storage systems by their I/O performance in terms of overall bandwidth and I/O.

At ISC 2026, SCNet submitted two systems based on ParaStor storage software and ParaStor file system and F9000 all-flash storage systems. The larger SCNet AICS-A submission ran the IO500 benchmark from 500 client nodes with 64,000 client processors and achieved an IO500 score of 79,110.05, with 26,888.39 GiB/s of bandwidth and 232,754.76 kIOPS of metadata performance. The smaller AICS-B was a 10-client submission with 2,560 client processors. It scored 7,839.30, with 2,551.40 GiB/s and 24,086.69 kIOPS. Both submissions identify Sugon as the storage vendor and ParaStor as the file system.

The results substantially exceeded Argonne National Laboratory's Aurora running a custom storage subsystem featuring Intel's Optane Persistent Memory modules, SSDs, and DAOS file system. A comparable Aurora Production result scored 32,165.90, with 10,066.09 GiB/s of bandwidth and 102,785.41 kIOPS, which means AICS-A's overall score was about 2.46X higher. In the 10-client category, AICS-B's 7,839.30 was about 2.72X faster than Aurora (which scored 2,885.57). Thus, when initially accepted into the Production lists, the two SCNet submissions displaced Aurora from the top positions in both the main Production and 10-Client Production rankings.

Just like the Top 500 list, which Top 20 largely includes one-off supercomputers, the IO500 accepts completely bespoke storage subsystems based on exotic hardware and custom parallel file systems. However, the IO500 requires its Production-list submissions to meet its highest reproducibility standard, which means their architecture must be sufficiently documented and the underlying file system generally available so that the results can be independently understood and reproduced.

So, while it is hard to expect someone trying to reproduce Aurora’s 230PB storage subsystem in their garage or data center, its architecture and software can be independently examined and reproduced on a smaller scale because DAOS is open source, downloadable, extensively documented, and has publicly available architecture, implementation details, and hardware/software requirements.

By contrast, Sugon's ParaStor is proprietary and far less transparent: IO500 said the F9000 submission lacked widely available architectural details and that the file system had limited general availability, which prevents independent examination and reproduction sufficient to meet the Production list's reproducibility standard.

The same applies to Huawei's OceanFS and SuperFS architectures as well as other proprietary architectures developed in China, which the Research list includes. For example, the Research IO500 list is led by Pengcheng Laboratory's CloudBrain system with Huawei OceanStor A800 storage and the OceanFS file system, which achieved an IO500 score of 603,334.56 with 8,291.11 GiB/s of sequential throughput and 43,903,983.64 KIOPS random performance.

What is perhaps a bit odd is that while Pengcheng Laboratory's CloudBrain and CloudBrain-II submissions are clearly marked as 'proprietary' in the reproducibility column of the Research IO500 list, the SCNet-A submission carries a 'fully reproducible' badge.

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