Over $11 million worth of Nvidia hardware has disappeared during transit from Northern California to Texas, with investigators yet to make any arrests or locate the missing cargo more than two months after the heist.
The cargo, consisting of six pallets of unspecified Nvidia equipment, departed Oakland on August 29 aboard a transport vehicle displaying the logo of a food delivery business. Destined for Fort Worth, Texas, the truck dropped off the radar shortly after departure. Oakland police were not alerted until a grand theft report was filed on September 13, following the intended recipients’ discovery that the delivery had failed to arrive. Investigators tracing the route determined that the vehicle made multiple multi-hour stops before law enforcement lost its signal entirely within San Bernardino County, California.
The theft fits into a wider pattern of lucrative, organized logistics strikes targeting high-demand computing gear. Law enforcement and industry investigators report that criminal outfits have siphoned off more than $100 million in data-center hardware shipments since June, employing sophisticated tactics like GPS spoofing and staged collisions involving transport escorts. UC Berkeley business professor Olaf Groth told ABC News that hardware valued at roughly $550,000 can command $1 million or more in overseas or gray markets where access to American technology is constrained, creating powerful financial incentives for organized groups.
California has seen multiple operations aimed directly at Nvidia products. In 2025, authorities investigated break-ins in Fremont and Union City that resulted in the loss of more than $7.5 million in Nvidia equipment. Not all attempts have succeeded, however; in September, thieves took two trailers bearing Nvidia and PlusAI logos from an exterior lot in California, only to abandon them when opening the containers revealed 20,000 pounds of sand per trailer, placed inside to test simulated cargo weights for autonomous driving systems.
Source: arstechnica.com
