Police in Oakland, California, are investigating the theft of six pallets of NVIDIA hardware worth $11.4 million that were bound for Fort Worth, Texas. A truck carrying a food transportation company's logo picked up the cargo in Oakland on August 29 as planned, but the truck and its drivers then went off the grid heading south. According to authorities, the truck made several multi-hour stops before police lost track of it in San Bernardino County. Apparently, nobody realized the cargo was gone until early September, and Oakland police say the theft was reported to them on September 13. No arrests have been announced.
What exactly was on those pallets hasn't been disclosed, so we don't know if it was AI accelerators, complete systems, or GeForce graphics cards. Speaking to ABC7, UC Berkeley professor Olaf Groth said NVIDIA chips can sell for roughly double their US price abroad, with a $550,000 compute system going for $1 million or more. He added that the heists are getting bigger and more complex, which points to increasingly professional crews. NVIDIA cargo has been a target before. Last year, police in Fremont and Union City investigated burglaries of NVIDIA cargo worth more than $7.5 million combined. In September, two pallets of ZOTAC RTX 5090 cards vanished from São Paulo's airport in Brazil, and one of the cards later showed up for sale online. Back in 2021, a truck full of EVGA graphics cards was also stolen in California. With NVIDIA hardware this hard to come by, shipments like these will probably stay a target.
Source: TechPowerUp News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing