Nvidia hardware worth $11.4M vanished between Oakland and Texas

A shipment of Nvidia hardware valued at $11.4 million vanished in transport between Oakland and Texas over the summer, and more than two months later police have announced no arrests or recovery of the cargo. Six pallets of unknown Nvidia equipment left Oakland on August 29 on a truck bound for Fort Worth, Texas, and the hardware was reportedly picked up as scheduled by a truck bearing the logo of a food transportation company before vanishing off the grid.

What police have confirmed

The theft was not noticed until early September, when the buyers realized the shipment had never been received. Police attempting to trace the truck's route found it had made several multi-hour stops after picking up the hardware before losing the truck somewhere in San Bernardino County, California. Oakland police confirmed that a grand theft report was filed on September 13 and that the investigation remains ongoing. Authorities have not said what Nvidia hardware was stolen or exactly how the theft was carried out.

A wider pattern of hardware thefts

The theft in Oakland is the latest in a wave of increasingly bold hardware heists. Thieves have made off with more than $100 million in similar shipments since June. According to investigators cited by NBC News, criminals have shown planning and sophistication by employing techniques like GPS location spoofing and even arranging collisions with police escort vehicles. Stolen components can be stripped down and sold in gray-market transactions or shipped overseas where access to US tech hardware may be restricted. Nvidia's hardware has been a specific target. In 2025, police investigated burglaries of Nvidia hardware valued at more than $7.5 million around Fremont and Union City, California, and police believe those thefts were carried out by a group that obtained vehicles for the heist in Southern California before traveling north to the Bay Area.

Professor Olaf Groth of UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business told ABC News that "if a chip costs about $550,000, then they go for about $1 million or more abroad." He said those margins may be incentivizing criminals, adding: "Because cargoes are getting bigger. The heists are getting more complex and that will point toward a professionalization of the teams that are hijacking these."

A theft that did not go as planned

Not every would-be heist crew gets it right. A theft in September, reported by Wired, saw two trailers marked with Nvidia and PlusAI logos stolen from outside of a warehouse facility in California. The trailers were recovered by police nearby, presumably after the criminals cut the locks to reveal they were each loaded with 20,000 pounds of sand. PlusAI is a company working on autonomous trucking solutions with Nvidia, and the sand was in the trailers to simulate freight loads.

Sources: Ars Technica