Truck Posing as Food Carrier Makes Off With $11.4 Million in NVIDIA AI Hardware

Six pallets gone, no arrests

Six pallets of NVIDIA hardware valued at $11.4 million vanished in Southern California after a truck marked with a food carrier's logo collected the load in Oakland, according to a report published on dev.to, republishing a piece from Japanese outlet Joho no Todai. The truck departed Oakland on August 29 and headed south. Investigators later reconstructed its route and found it had made several lengthy stops before the trail was lost in San Bernardino County.

The theft was not reported to Oakland police until September 13, fifteen days after pickup — a delay long enough for the hardware to be moved and split up. Two months on, no arrests had been made, and basic questions remain open: where the goods went, who planned the job, and whether the food carrier branding on the truck was genuine or fake. The specific hardware models were not disclosed; the cargo was described only as AI semiconductors and accompanying equipment, averaging roughly $1.9 million per pallet.

Export controls inflate the black-market price

The incentive is largely economic. Olaf Groth, a professor at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business, told the outlet that a chip costing $550,000 in the US can sell for around $1 million or more abroad — about double the domestic price. US export rules restrict sales of NVIDIA's high-performance AI chips to several countries, including China, and the harder official channels become, the more black-market prices climb. Stolen chips offer a workaround.

Groth characterized NVIDIA's chips as national-security assets and criticized how little protection they receive in transit, adding that the destination for stolen goods like these is unknown — possibly China, or even an active conflict zone.

A pattern, not a one-off

The Bay Area has seen a string of NVIDIA cargo thefts since 2025. That year, police in Fremont and Union City investigated several commercial thefts involving more than $7.5 million in NVIDIA hardware; investigators believe the crews sourced vehicles in Southern California before driving north. In September 2026, two trailers were stolen from autonomous trucking company PlusAI's Fremont facility. The site displayed both NVIDIA and PlusAI logos, so the thieves may have expected valuable AI hardware — the trailers actually held about 18 metric tons of sand used in brake testing and were later recovered, abandoned, in nearby Newark.

According to the report, Groth said targeted shipments are growing larger and the methods more elaborate, pointing to increasingly professional crews. The FBI has warned about thieves setting up fraudulent carrier accounts and posing as legitimate haulers to reroute valuable freight, and investigators have documented GPS spoofing as well as deliberately ramming escort vehicles.

The problem extends past NVIDIA. Cargo-theft tracking service Verisk CargoNet, cited in the report, recorded 677 organized supply chain thefts across the US and Canada in the second quarter of 2026, with estimated losses of $304.6 million. AI hardware stands out as a target because a few pallets can carry enormous value in a compact load.

Stolen GPUs do resurface

Some stolen hardware eventually reappears. In October, two pallets of GPUs — including RTX 5090 cards — went missing at Guarulhos International Airport in Brazil, valued at roughly $470,000. Three airport contractors were identified as suspects, and one card was traced through its serial number after it surfaced in an online marketplace listing. The California theft was about 24 times larger by value.

Why it matters

The case exposes a gap between policy and practice. NVIDIA's high-end chips are treated as strategically controlled technology on paper, yet a truck with a food logo can drive away with $11.4 million of them. Export controls, meant to restrict access, effectively double the street price abroad and fund an increasingly organized theft economy around that premium. For organizations building AI infrastructure, physical logistics — carrier verification, tamper-resistant tracking and fast incident reporting — now sit inside the security perimeter alongside software and network defenses.