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.
As reported by the Mercury News , six pallets of unknown Nvidia equipment left Oakland on August 29 on a truck bound for Fort Worth, Texas. The hardware was reportedly picked up as scheduled by a truck bearing the logo of a food transportation company before vanishing off the grid. The theft wasn’t noticed until early September, when the buyers realized that 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 there was a grand theft report filed on September 13 and that the investigation remains ongoing. The authorities have not said what Nvidia hardware was stolen or exactly how this theft was carried out.
The theft in Oakland is the latest in a wave of increasingly bold hardware heists. As Ars’ Ashley Belanger reported recently , thieves have made off with more than $100 million in similar shipments since June. According to investigators cited by NBC News , the criminals have shown planning and sophistication by employing techniques like GPS location spoofing and even arranging staged 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.
