Amazon Bans Account Over Nvidia DGX Spark Order, Others Report Similar

Not an isolated case

Saraev is not alone. Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney wrote on X that Amazon cancelled his regular orders after he tried to buy two Nvidia GPUs, which are often used for local inference. In September, a user named Dracones89 reported in Nvidia's developer forum that Amazon blocked his account for "suspicious activity" after he tried to buy two Asus GX10 systems.

The backdrop is a component shortage driven by the AI boom, as chipmakers shift production toward data centers. Apple told Reuters in June it had never seen component prices rise so fast and so sharply, and that it now had to raise prices on some products. Samsung and Dell face similar pressure.

Why retailers may be wary

Local inference is gaining popularity alongside open-weight models, whose weights anyone can download and run. Users gain privacy and independence, since code, documents and customer data stay on the machine, and the models work offline and often respond faster. But malicious actors also use open-weight models, so large orders of such hardware could raise suspicion at retailers.

A Reddit post describes the US chain Micro Center asking a customer to sign a declaration, show photo ID and state where the hardware would be installed. The form explicitly banned export and resale. Memory scarcity may therefore not be the only reason orders are being turned away.