Six pallets of Nvidia hardware valued at $11.4 million vanished during a shipment from Oakland, California to Fort Worth, Texas, according to reporting by the Bay Area News Group first published on November 6. The shipment was collected in Oakland on August 29 by a truck bearing the logo of a food transportation company, a disguise shippers have adopted to make high value cargo less identifiable. The vehicle made several multi-hour stops heading south and investigators lost track of it in San Bernardino County.
The loss was not noticed until early September, and the Oakland Police Department confirmed it received a grand theft report on September 13, more than two weeks after the pickup. No arrests have been announced and none of the cargo has been reported recovered. Neither police nor the reports identify which Nvidia products were in the shipment, so the $11.4 million figure is a cargo value, not a count of any specific accelerator or server.
The case fits an established pattern rather than standing alone. Investigations in Fremont and Union City in 2025 alone involved more than $7.5 million in losses for Nvidia, authorities in Chicago recovered $1.3 million of stolen equipment in June 2026 with the help of GPS trackers, and in September thieves stole Nvidia branded trailers that turned out to be carrying 20,000 pounds of sand used to simulate loads. Police say some theft crews now counter GPS tracking and have rammed escort vehicles following shipments.
For the data center supply chain the economics are the point. A single pallet of current generation AI hardware is worth on the order of $1.9 million at the reported average, the hardware is fungible and in global shortage, and resale channels abroad pay premiums over domestic prices, according to a UC Berkeley professor cited in the original reporting. Shippers are responding with monitoring services, camera networks and disguised vehicles. In this instance the disguise did not work.