Six pallets of NVIDIA hardware worth $11.4 million stolen while en route to Texas

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, the Bay Area News Group reports. A truck bearing the logo of a food transportation company picked up the shipment in Oakland on August 29 as planned, but the truck and its drivers then left the system heading south. Authorities say the truck made several stops lasting several hours before police lost track of it in San Bernardino County. Apparently no one realized the shipment was missing until early September, and Oakland police say the theft was reported to them on September 13. No arrests have been announced.

Exactly what was on these palettes hasn’t been disclosed, so we don’t know if they were AI accelerators, full systems, or GeForce graphics cards. Speaking to ABC7, UC Berkeley professor Olaf Groth said NVIDIA chips can sell overseas for roughly double their U.S. price, with a $550,000 computer system worth $1 million or more. He added that heists are becoming larger and more complex, indicating that the teams are becoming more professional.

NVIDIA Cargo has already been a target. Last year, police in Fremont and Union City investigated burglaries of NVIDIA merchandise worth a combined $7.5 million. In September, two pallets of ZOTAC RTX 5090 cards went missing from São Paulo airport in Brazil, and one of the cards was later put up for sale online. In 2021, a truck full of EVGA graphics cards was also stolen in California. With NVIDIA hardware so hard to come by, shipments like these will likely remain a target.