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This type of heist has been growing over the past couple of years, but just this year the one incident in Reno made $38 million in gear disappear. In the same city, $15m of semiconductors and Apple products got nabbed in July 2025, according to Fortune . The month of June 2026 was particularly profitable for thieves, as they made off with $13m of gear around the Mojave Desert area, and $10m worth of server rack components headed to Texas.
The stolen gear includes servers, fiber-optic and copper cabling, RAM modules, drives, routers, and other miscellaneous gear. Although NBC doesn't mention GPUs by name, stolen data center servers headed for AI buildouts are likely to have some.
Even copper wire is worth a lot these days, as one snagged trailer had $300,000 worth of the now-precious metal. As Keith Lewis from Verisk Cargonet puts it, "it's like stealing pure gold bars […] it's so much easier to steal [data center shipments] than to rob a bank."
The methods used employ technological smarts and brutality in equal amounts. Each heist is unique, but broad patterns are apparent. Thieves gain access to online accounts of freight brokers and carriers, and from there on they can look up cargo manifests and shipping schedules, as well as impersonate shipping companies. Then they track a shipment or issue a false one, and eventually collect the truck with the precious cargo.
AI Cargo thieves ram security escorts to hijack hardware shipments in California
Thieves steal Nvidia-labeled trailers expecting massive AI GPU payday, but score 40,000 pounds of sand instead
AI data center investment projected to hit $32 trillion by 2050
Key considerations
- Investor positioning can change fast
- Volatility remains possible near catalysts
- Macro rates and liquidity can dominate flows
Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/big-tech/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/big-tech/data-center-gear-is-being-hijacked-in-transit-to-the-tune-of-hundreds-of-millions-grand-theft-gpu-thieves-hack-accounts-perform-hit-and-runs-spoof-gps-signals-and-funnel-hardware-to-china#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com/membership
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Informational only. No financial advice. Do your own research.