Six pallets of Nvidia equipment valued at $11.4 million disappeared after leaving Oakland, California, on August 29 aboard a truck headed for Fort Worth, Texas, according to The Mercury News. The shipment was collected on schedule by a truck displaying the logo of a food transportation company, then dropped off the radar. The buyers did not flag the missing delivery until early September, when they determined the hardware had never arrived.
Investigators trying to reconstruct the truck's route discovered it had stopped for several hours at a time after taking on the load, then was lost somewhere in San Bernardino County, California. Oakland police confirmed a grand theft report was filed on September 13 and said the investigation is still open. Authorities have not disclosed which Nvidia hardware was taken or precisely how the theft was executed.
The Oakland case adds to a series of increasingly brazen hardware heists. More than $100 million in comparable shipments have been stolen since June, and investigators speaking to NBC News described crews that plan carefully, using tactics such as GPS location spoofing and arranging collisions with police escort vehicles. Taken components can be disassembled and moved through gray-market sales or shipped overseas to markets where access to US technology hardware is limited.
Nvidia hardware has drawn particular attention from thieves. In 2025, police investigated burglaries of Nvidia equipment worth more than $7.5 million in the Fremont and Union City areas of California. According to The Mercury News, investigators believe a group acquired vehicles for those thefts in Southern California and then drove north to the Bay Area.
Olaf Groth, a professor at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business, told ABC News that a chip costing roughly $550,000 can fetch about $1 million or more abroad. He said those margins may be driving the criminals, and that larger cargoes and more intricate heists point to increasingly professional hijacking crews.
Not every attempt succeeds. Wired reported that in September, two trailers bearing Nvidia and PlusAI logos were taken from outside a California warehouse and recovered by police nearby. The thieves had cut the locks to find each trailer loaded with 20,000 pounds of sand, which PlusAI, a company developing autonomous trucking with Nvidia, had placed there to simulate freight loads.
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