Thieves made off with a staggering $11.4 million haul of Nvidia computer hardware after a cargo truck carrying the high-value shipment mysteriously vanished in Southern California.
The truck, marked with a food company’s logo, left Oakland on Aug. 29 carrying six pallets of Nvidia hardware bound for Fort Worth, Texas, in what was supposed to be a routine consignment delivery, the East Bay Times reported.
The initial handoff went off as planned, but the truck and its drivers allegedly disappeared somewhere along the route south, leaving investigators scrambling to track down the multimillion-dollar shipment.
Authorities eventually lost the vehicle’s trail in San Bernardino County. Before vanishing, the truck made several stops lasting multiple hours, according to the report.
The theft wasn’t reported until early September, giving the suspected crooks several days to get away with the pricey cargo. No arrests have been announced.
It’s the latest in a string of brazen thefts targeting shipments of valuable Nvidia-related hardware as demand for artificial intelligence technology sends the value of data center equipment soaring.
In September, thieves swiped two co-branded Nvidia and PlusAI semi-trailers from a warehouse in Newark, Calif., apparently expecting to score a fortune in AI graphics processing units or chips.
Instead, the would-be crooks got a massive load of sand — all 40,000 pounds of it.
The trailers had been loaded with sand rather than the high-value hardware the thieves appeared to be after.
In a separate June heist, thieves stole a transport trailer carrying valuable data center servers as it traveled east toward Georgia, reportedly forcing an escort vehicle to pull over during the robbery, according to NBC.
The trailer was eventually discovered abandoned and empty in a Stockton truck yard, but the valuable equipment had already disappeared.
