The AI buildout now has a theft problem with a price on it. Cargo risk management firm Overhaul reports that more than $150 million worth of AI equipment has been stolen this year, that individual losses regularly exceed $30 million, and that such thefts occur weekly, Datacenter Dynamics reported. Reports of stolen data center equipment, compute components and semiconductors are up 34 percent since 2024 in Overhaul’s data.
The method has changed more than the volume. The primary route is now fraud rather than force: deception such as false carrier identities, altered paperwork or spoofed communications featured in 92 percent of the high value technology shipment thefts Overhaul analysed. One incident in the report involved $60 million of hardware belonging to an unnamed company being redirected to an unauthorized location; the firm was alerted in time and recovered the goods. A separate earlier case, detailed by the Washington Post, involved $9.5 million of Apple products and $6 million of AMD chips stolen in July 2025.
Overhaul’s caveat matters and is stated in the report coverage: the firm did not disclose the underlying incident count, geographic coverage, or the shipment volume against which the increase was measured, so the $150 million is a reported total from a vendor with a commercial interest in cargo risk services, not an official statistic. It is graded accordingly.
Even discounted, the direction fits the economics. GPU hardware is dense, standardised, resalable and moving in unprecedented volume on predictable routes to known construction sites, which is the profile cargo fraud targets. The report adds two cost markers: The Information has reported data center late fees near $5 million a day, up from about $1 million in spring, and Swiss Re forecasts data center insurance premiums could approach $24 billion by 2030, against an S&P Global estimate of about $10 billion today. A stolen tranche is therefore not a hardware loss; it is a delivery date loss, and delivery dates are what the sold out capacity in today’s Amazon story is priced on.