A multimillion-dollar Nvidia cargo theft is still unresolved more than two months after six pallets of equipment disappeared during a truck run from Oakland, California, to Fort Worth, Texas. Oakland police have made no arrests and have not recovered the load, which was valued at $11.4 million, according to authorities.
The shipment and its disappearance
The hardware left Oakland on August 29. A truck displaying the branding of a food transportation company arrived as arranged and took custody of the pallets, but the vehicle then dropped out of sight. The loss did not come to light until early September, when the intended recipients in Texas reported that the freight had not arrived.
Investigators trying to reconstruct the truck’s path found that it had paused for extended periods, each lasting several hours, after collecting the cargo. The trail eventually went cold in San Bernardino County, California. Oakland police confirmed that a grand theft report was filed on September 13 and that the case remains active. Officials have not disclosed the specific Nvidia products involved or the method used to carry out the theft.
A pattern of larger, more sophisticated heists
The Oakland incident fits into a broader surge in cargo crime targeting high-value technology shipments. Since June, thieves have stolen more than $100 million in comparable freight, according to reporting on the trend. Investigators cited by NBC News have described crews that show careful planning, including the use of GPS location spoofing and even staged collisions with police escort vehicles.
Nvidia hardware has been a recurring objective. In 2025, police looked into burglaries of Nvidia equipment worth more than $7.5 million in the Fremont and Union City areas of California. Authorities there suspected a group that acquired vehicles in Southern California before heading north to the Bay Area.
The financial incentive is substantial. Olaf Groth, a professor at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, told ABC News that a chip costing roughly $550,000 can fetch $1 million or more abroad. He suggested that such margins are driving criminals toward bigger cargoes and more elaborate operations, pointing to what he described as the professionalization of the teams behind the hijackings.
Not every attempt succeeds
Some would-be thieves have come away empty-handed. In September, two trailers bearing Nvidia and PlusAI logos were taken from outside a warehouse in California, according to Wired. Police recovered the trailers nearby. When the locks were cut, the trailers were found to contain 20,000 pounds of sand apiece. PlusAI works on autonomous trucking technology with Nvidia, and the sand had been loaded to simulate freight weight.
The Oakland case remains under investigation, with no public indication of where the six pallets or the truck went after leaving San Bernardino County.
