Abstract:
In the context of skyrocketing demand for AI hardware and extremely tight supply, even users who normally purchase hardware have become suspects on the platform.
Amazon is suspected of having begun canceling GPU and hardware orders on a large scale, and has even directly closed buyer accounts.
User @nicksaraev stated that he placed 4 DGX Spark orders on October 31, but all were canceled. After several attempts, Amazon not only refused to let the order go through, but also directly closed his account after the so-called verification process. The email he shared showed that Amazon said it decided to close the account after careful review.
He said that he had never encountered this kind of problem before, and Amazon only gave vague verification explanations, neither clearly stating the reasons for the violation nor providing appeal channels
, after the account was blocked, his Prime membership, gift card balance and historical order records were all inaccessible.
Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney was not spared. Although his account was not blocked,
after placing an order for two NVIDIA GPUs, subsequent regular orders began to be continuously canceled. He could place the order normally, but it was temporarily canceled before shipment.
Sweeney said that this happened after he placed an order to purchase a graphics card. His regular orders had been normal before, which means that in Amazon's system, the GPU purchase seemed to trigger some kind of marking mechanism, which also affected all subsequent orders.
It is currently impossible to confirm whether this is a system failure or Amazon's intentional anti-scalper mechanism. The demand for computing hardware is currently extremely high but the supply is scarce. NVIDIA DGX Spark, a popular device for local AI inference, is often hard to find. Amazon may be limiting the quantity that a single customer can purchase.
But in the case of @nicksaraev, Amazon directly banned the account instead of just canceling the order, and the response clearly exceeded the scope of regular purchase restrictions.
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