Nvidia hardware has become a specific target for cargo thieves, with police investigating more than $7.5 million worth of stolen equipment around Fremont and Union City, California, in 2025. Experts say the high overseas resale value of advanced chips may be encouraging increasingly organized and complex heists, although at least one attempted theft reportedly resulted in the perpetrators taking trailers filled with sand instead of Nvidia hardware.
High-value Nvidia shipments attract organized thieves
Police believe one group involved in the thefts obtained a robbery vehicle in Southern California before traveling north to the San Francisco Bay Area, according to The Mercury News.
Professor Olaf Gross of the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, told ABC News, “If a chip costs about $550,000, it will sell for about $1 million or more overseas.”
Gross said those potential profit margins may be motivating criminals. “The shipments are getting bigger,” he said. “The heists are becoming more complex, which will show the specialization of the teams that hijack the shipments.”
One theft yielded sand instead of chips
Not every attempted robbery has succeeded. In an incident reported by Wired in September, two trailers bearing Nvidia and PlusAI logos were stolen from outside a warehouse facility in California.
Nearby police later recovered the trailers, apparently after the thieves cut the locks and discovered that each one contained 20,000 pounds of sand. PlusAI is working with Nvidia on self-driving trucking solutions, and the sand had been loaded into the trailers to simulate the weight of cargo.
Source: arstechnica.com