Six Pallets of Nvidia Hardware Worth $11.4 Million Stolen After Leaving Oakland

The cargo left Oakland on August 29, picked up as planned by a truck from a food transport company, authorities said, according to ABC News. Investigators later lost track of the vehicle in San Bernardino County, in Southern California. The victim, who has not been named, reported the theft to the Oakland Police Department on September 13. The $11.4 million value was first reported by the Bay Area News Group, ABC said.

"The Oakland Police Department is investigating a grand theft that occurred in East Oakland," police said in a statement. No comment from Nvidia was included in the reports, and the reports do not say which Nvidia products were in the shipment.

The case adds to a run of thefts and attempted thefts aimed at Nvidia hardware in the San Francisco Bay Area, where demand for AI chips has turned truck shipments into high-value targets. Last year, police in Fremont and Union City investigated burglaries involving Nvidia cargo valued at more than $7.5 million. In September, suspects who apparently believed they were taking trucks loaded with Nvidia technology instead made off with 40,000 pounds of sand.

Olaf Groth, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley's Haas School of Business, told ABC that the scale and complexity of the thefts point to increasingly professional criminal operations. "There's lots and lots of incentives to hijack those chips anywhere where security is weak," he said, adding that "these chips command about double the price that they command inside the United States."

Groth also framed the losses as a security issue rather than only a commercial one. "Security has to get a lot tighter around these because they're a national security asset," he said. "This is a national security concern as well because we don't know where these chips are going."

That concern carries weight because Washington restricts exports of Nvidia's most advanced chips to China and other countries, and the gap between US prices and what the hardware fetches abroad gives thieves a ready market. For logistics companies, insurers and data centre builders, the thefts add cost and risk to moving equipment that is already scarce and expensive.

The investigation remains open, and authorities have not said whether the Oakland case is connected to the earlier Bay Area incidents.