$11.4M in Nvidia hardware vanishes during shipment from CA to TX
freightwaves.comIs that... a lot? I have no clue how much stuff "vanishes" regularly and how much it's worth.
I was talking to a guy who worked in logistics. He said “vanishing” was a common problem for high dollar items. He had recently had a shipment of Xboxes, the driver had specifically been told, “Do not stop, keep driving, make the assigned times”. Of course, the driver went off book, went somewhere else, and when he got back to the truck, magically a bunch of the order was missing. Guy was convinced the driver was on the take and would tip off someone about the juicy hauls.
While probably harder to find a no-questions asked buyer, the price premium on GPUs is a lot higher than some consoles.
It happens all the time. I work in logistics, it's unbelievable how much general criminality and fraud there is in this industry.
The scenario you outlined is not all that common. There are much more sophisticated scams. What I see the most often are disclosures of load information and pickup numbers to bad actors (e.g. via social engineering).
When you roll up to a facility with a truck, you need to provide information from the bill of lading, and the key piece of data is the pickup number, which is basically like a PIN for the shipment. If that gets into the wrong hands, then someone else can show up at that facility, pose as the carrier, and get loaded with the goods. It's quite low risk during the operation because there's no hijacking or anything else obviously criminal happening. People will literally load the thief's truck.
That was exactly how that Canada gold heist happened. Thieves had arranged fake documents and the staff helped load $20 million in gold bars onto the truck.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto_Pearson_International_...
Look up the CoolKicks scandal. A sneaker reseller worth tens of millions was caught paying off people at Nike's warehouses to swap shipping labels and get items shipped to them instead. These were unreleased and rare shoes worth millions. It took the FBI months to catch them.
Food fraud is also rampant. Stuff like olive oil is commonly fake or much lower quality than advertised. Its something like 20% of all food items are fraudulent in some way or another.
I worked with an Insurer many years ago, produce and Nuts were one of their largest thefts. Easy to fence the goods when there isn't a serial number.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Canadian_Maple_Syrup_Hei...
You can't really dust for maple syrup.
That is different type of scam though. My favorite is seafood - if you are buying already fileted and it is not salmon or tuna - there is solid chance you won't even get the same species.
If it happens with KitKat, I can imagine happening with high end GPUs https://www.forbes.com/sites/peterlyon/2026/03/30/chocolate-...
Around 2012 or so a client was building out a bunch of new database servers and had purchased fusion-io cards for them, which I think were going for something like $20k each. Well, the carrier never showed up on the day we were supposed to get them at the DC. I always assumed someone looked up the price, saw $100k+ worth of hardware that could be stuffed in a tote bag and decided to never show up to work again.
> While probably harder to find a no-questions asked buyer, the price premium on GPUs is a lot higher than some consoles.
I'd go further than that. A no-questions-asked buyer for a console merely suspects there's shenanigans afoot, and will expect a considerable discount off the sticker price. A no-questions-asked buyer for server GPUs almost certainly knows for a fact there's shenanigans afoot, but is likely to pay a premium over the sticker price anyway.
Another reason why they are cheap is because Xbox will ban the consoles once they know they were stolen. GPUs on the other hand don't have a remote kill switch after being stolen.
Don't give them ideas
Given current market tends, if that becomes more frequent the likelihood of consumers actually getting GPUs goes up, as these will at least end up on various markets
This type of thing is where a lot of prescription drugs that hit the black market come from.
The manufacturers of drugs are highly regulated.
The prescribers of drugs are highly regulated.
The disbursers of prescription drugs are highly regulated.
The shippers; not so much.
There's a good reason the mob likes logistics companies.
I worked at one of these places in college. Everybody had layers and layers of processes to make sure the shipment of controlled substances weren't tampered with. Because like you said the shipping companies were mostly immune to consequences from that. They'd wash their hands of the bad actors and move on. But it was seen was our fault if it happened and we didn't find it. Because of course we could be in on it and our not finding it could be part of the ploy!
In one a Fedex driver and conspirators would repackage a large shipment of painkillers. They'd take a single bottle from the a few boxes on each pallet and seal them back up in such a way that was very hard to spot.
Another time they'd take like 10% of the pills out of a bunch of bottles.
Many times the driver would get lunch and the truck would be stolen. Like once a year.
I used to think this until I read that "supplements" contain real sildenafil.
Supplements are pretty much unregulated, and can have some fairly scary ingredients. The regulators generally don't mess with them, until someone (usually multiple someones) has a problem.
Lots of dodgy nutritional supplements out there. Look for NSF Certified Safe for Sport products to be sure of what you're putting in your body.
https://www.nsf.org/knowledge-library/importance-nsf-certifi...
And buy direct from the manufacturer. If you order through a reseller like Amazon then there's always a risk of getting counterfeit products if someone tampered with the supply chain.
Wouldn't at least some shipping companies have the technology to track their trucks pretty closely nowadays?
They do. But the LTL trucks are easy to load and unload.
So you have tracking devices in the cab, the trailer, the pallets, and the boxes, and things STILL disappear.
My wife worked for a woman's health and beauty company that sold a lot of perfume and cologne, and their trucks would get ripped off all the time.
was there a general region where this happened more frequently that doesn't look like a heat map of the general population? I'm thinking specifically about east coast crime family tropes here
Are there not commercial equivalent of AirTags that can be hidden into pallets to track things?
> Guy was convinced the driver was on the take and would tip off someone about the juicy hauls.
Most logistics companies operate on shoestring IT budgets, and yet their software systems are juicy targets for organized crime, just like real estate companies.
This was a central plot point in The Fast and the Furious (2001)
That was too dramatic. Crossbows, etc. If anything the driver is probably cut in and involved. Thieves randomly picking out the truck with $11M worth of GPUs just seems implausible (or trucks just get robbed left at right all the time, the yeah, there is a chance one time they’ll hit high value cargo).
I much prefer the train heist from Breaking Bad
Yeah, I would guess the driver is one who tips them off. Goes to some plausible location, gets out and takes a long enough lunch or bathroom break and then bam! “Omg someone stole this while I wasn’t looking”.
Why aren't they putting cameras on every inch of the truck and immediately call law enforcement? Or are senders cheaping out on shipping
The ideal amount of fraud is greater than zero.
Putting a bunch of technical compliance controls in place to stop the one-percent of bad actors is going to increase friction for everyone else.
What form does this friction take?
They will probably re-evaluate after this. Another thing is to send additional security with a trailing car. Hopefully assigned at random so it can't be someone connected with the driver. I know someone was shipping shelled walnuts and they did that as a semi full of those things can be in the many hundreds of thousands of dollars/euros in value.
> probably harder to find a no-questions asked buyer
Is it ? with all the news this week about dummy servers and other tricks to bypass export controls, it seems there would be many no questions asked buyers abroad.
Am reminded of the premise of the first The Fast & Furious movie.
Heh, a play straight out of the movie Goodfellas
Can xboxes still play games without connecting to the internet?
I knew a UPS logistics guy, who told me (20 years ago) that an entire 30+ foot UPS trailer full of brand new laptops simply disappeared from a warehouse.
In my somewhat misspent youth, we used to steal VCRs and high end DVD players (gosh I feel old now). We started small, but eventually escalated a bit to teaming up to pull whole semi trucks over as they left the Port of Long Beach and taking everything. I’ve since reformed but just illustrating that it’s always been an issue. Then DVD players and VCRs, now GPUs.
"pull whole semi trucks over as they left the Port of Long Beach and taking everything" what does that mean?
Have you pre-ordered GTA-VI?
How did you sell that many units once you had them?
This sounds like The Fast & The Furious.
Yeah, that's what it is.
Working in big tech has completely torpedoed what I consider to be a lot of money. $11M is pocket change to them.
$11m is like a truckload of diapers. Or diesel.
It could be an order as small as two NVIDIA NVL72 systems.
I was wondering if there'd be jokes about the price inflation on GPUs.
Unfortunately this isn't one. $5.7m is a reasonable estimate for one of those systems.
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
Looks like I replied to the wrong comment. Should have been: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50489423
It feels like no... I worked in a cement plant warehouse once where a small bin of misplaced electronics was like $2M. It feels like the amount of shrinkage in electronics shipping and warehousing is probably enormous, it's just more sensational to report on it for NVIDIA right now.
Yea was going to say that's like 200 H100s. Which is a lot. But barely noticeable on an nvidia scale.
The expected merchandise value of a loaded truck picked at random is ~$35,000. Armored trucks that transport cash rarely carry more than $1 million. So yes, it's a lot and most likely a targeted theft.
With today's prices, that's maybe enough 5090s for a proper LAN party.
6 pallets is not a lot to go missing. could be theft, could be somebody put them in the wrong rack when they unloaded a truck.
They were not just misplaced. They can't find the truck and are investigating it as grand theft.
No idea about logistics, but my cheap retro game console went from 0.7kg to 0.002 gram overnight at the depot. I thought it was oddly light when I took the box from the shop counter, and was very disappointed when I opened it.
For California? No. For civilized areas, that's a lot! Biggest haul I've heard about recently was 500k of copper from a truck and made the news in multiple outlets. I'm sure we don't hear about most of these incidents in the news, though. All parties involved are not interested in publicizing these events.
No one's really said anything about it (maybe the company's in the news for other reasons?), but posted a few times:
Tech-Insider $11.4M of Nvidia Chips Vanished in Oakland (6 points, 1 week ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50394165
TomsHardware Six pallets of Nvidia GPUs worth $11.4M stolen in California in Aug 2026 (7 points, 1 week ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50394256
ArsTechnica Nvidia hardware worth $11.4M vanished between Oakland and Texas (9 points, 6 days ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50405863
TechPowerup (10 points, 6 days ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50407874
Probably trying to find it by keeping it alive in the news.
These guys have unlimited money, why are they still transporting with regular couriers? There are tons of end-to-end secure logistics companies out there that can do the job. I can't imagine their insurance is too happy about it either.
It's been an ongoing well-coordinated effort, with gear often ending up in China. Hello, where is the FBI?
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/big-tech/data-cen...
It's going to make a hell of a good movie one day though.
> These guys have unlimited money, why are they still transporting with regular couriers?
Commercial shipments don’t work like when you receive a package from Amazon. The terms of the freight, including the point at which ownership is handed off, are negotiated terms. An $11.4 million contract would have this negotiated and agreed upon. Depending on how it’s structured, the shipment may not have been the shipper’s responsibility at all after it left the warehouse.
> I can't imagine their insurance is too happy about it either.
Insurance would take the risk of the transport method into account. The policy would say what transport methods are covered and the allowed methods would be used to calculate the risk of loss.
I usually have two options. FOB origin, where I assume ownership when the item leaves the seller’s dock. FOB destination is more expensive, but the seller maintains ownership until the item is delivered to my choice of destination.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOB_(shipping)
I always pay for FOB destination when ordering high value items. I bought two 250kVA UPSes from Eaton and one of the pallets tipped over on the truck.
The 2% I paid for FOB destination meant Eaton delivered another 250kVA UPS at their cost. Unsure if Eaton was made whole by the shipper or not.
This, exactly. There's a pretty good chance this is all on the buyer, by contract.
> These guys have unlimited money, why are they still transporting with regular couriers?
Because decisions about how to handle individual units are made based on unit economics. And if you have unlimited money $10 million in lost goods is a rounding error that doesn't require any action.
Brilliant. You're hired ;)
11M worth of chips is very small stakes for all involved[1]. It is just about two NVL72 racks worth.
Every logistics operations expects a certain percentage of theft, they insure for it. The cost of securing has to be less than cost of loss. The logistics departments are doing 10's of billions of dollars every month to every hyperscaler and all the neoclouds all over the country (and internationally).
Even military logistics routinely losses high value items - from the recent f-35 part they tried to ship via HK(and lost to China) to even full nuclear bombs that are lost to this day from the cold war era.
If we cannot secure nuclear bombs 100% during transit, there isn't going to be 100% success for computer chips.
[1]Even for foreign adversaries, probably not worth the risk of the scandal just to get two racks. They need orders of magnitude more - the South East Asian route in the news this week seems to be $5-10B worth of chips for context.
There's a lot more than just this incident, and not just GPUs.
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/big-tech/data-cen...
Maybe there's going to be a GTA 6 mission based on this eventually..
I don't have an answer just anecdotally I know we'd use UPS (not even usps) to ship classified documents when I worked at the DOE
USPS accidentally delivered a bunch of classified military documents to my parents house when I was a kid. Some government official came out to personally take them back and thanked my parents profusely for returning them.
A classified F-35 component was shipped using UPS and it somehow ended up in China
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/24/chinaf-f35-components-hong-k...
In the early 00s I worked in print production and we printed a ton of material for the DoE. Their own employees would give us classified documents to print into binders for presentations/meetings all the time. We were basically a Kinkos...
UPS also somehow delivered stealth F35 Parts directly to China... no espionage required
If you have unlimited money, it also means that $11.4M is nothing to you.
1. This was 6 pallets, not really a large shipment.
2. Was it an issue with the courier? The article makes it sound like it was picked up by a truck that wasn't supposed to
It's a question of how often it fails and how much it costs to fix it. If they can save $1 on average by doing it the dumb way, then that's what they'll do.
1/ their insurance doesn't give a fuck
2/ why would the FBI get involved in local police matters?
Well, it's an interstate commerce incident, which is squarely within the FBI's purview.
Even as someone very skeptical of the application of the 'interstate commercial clause', I must say this is a crystal clear example of it.
As we've heard repeatedly this week, for unrelated reasons, it's also national security issue. That's definitely FBI purview
I’m not concerned at all about China, why are you? Have they threatened you in any way? How? Engage the question with intellectual honesty.
This is the point Jensen staked his legacy on, he will be proved right.
Im not threaten by China at all, there should be no sale restrictions. However I also don't think CEOs should be able to sidestep government regulations that they operate under and I hope he gets nailed to the wall over this.
If I got caught selling even a handful of restricted GPUs to China, I would be in prison. If we want to even pretend we live under the Rule of Law, this guy should be too.
> However I also don't think CEOs should be able to sidestep government regulations
Why not?
Is Nvidia an American company or a global company?
Jensen is right, logical and pragmatic
> I hope he gets nailed to the wall over this
Hope whatever you want to hope, go look at your local towns and cities and tell me how they’re doing. Go see what our retarded mindset of self-harm did to us.
>Rule of Law
What a nice pipedream. America can’t be a place of dreams and of wanting harm to others at the same time, you’ve gotta pick a lane buddy. The jingoism is coming from a tiny tiny handful of people, most Americans don’t give a fuuuuuck and just wanna have fun. There’s no reason for us to restrict or fight China it’s the dumbest shit, they’re so innovative
Do you think I'm the FBI? Why are you asking me this like I'm the one making the claims? All I did was report what is being said about the situation. Also, nobody asked if you were concerned. Why is your opinion important or interesting in any way regarding this. Are you Jensen using an alias?
Jensen is simply right and an actual legend in the valley
their insurance doesn't give a fuck
When the company doesn't care, the insurance still cares.
When the police don't care, the insurance still cares.
Insurance always cares.
death, taxes and insurance caring about these things
the insurance doesn’t care in the slightest and is happy with this particular trade, many shipments don’t get stolen
It’s baked into the cost
Insurance cares about losing hundreds more billions on hurricanes and floods, and even then they barely give a fuck. Nobody cares about some little shitty shipment
slightest and is happy with this particular trade, many shipments don’t get stolen
Clearly you've never owned a business or dealt with commercial insurance. Perhaps stop replying since you don't know what you're talking about.
> 2/ why would the FBI get involved in local police matters?
Because as far as the US government is concerned, GPU technology is an export-controlled, somewhat sensitive item. Like non-nuclear components for nuclear weapons, in a way.
jensen is right, comparing GPUs and AI to nukes is lunacy holy fuck, which planet are you on?
Do you know what modern nukes do? They’re horrific. Token generators and JEPA are cute science experiments, barely useful at all. Prove me wrong.
Yeah, the FBI is busy felatios for Binance and their billion funny-dollar coins!
Presumably, these GPU's have [known] serial numbers?
And the driver sends that Serial number back to nvidia when checking for updates?
For tech like this, doesn't more or less reveal where these things ultimately end up ?
^ guy who never heard of a telemetry-blocking firewall
They stole three whole gaming GPUs?
Nope, two datacentre-first GPUs with at least 32 GB RAM. EACH.
~150 GPUs (presuming 80k usd per card). would fit in a sedan.
Six pallets? Quite the sedan. Maybe if you unpacked it all and transported without any cushioning, which is stupid.
Unpacking requires quite a bit of labor. Blending the GPUs into a powder would be ideal e.g. [0]
When you reach your destination you can simply reassemble the cards
obviously not by the pallet. but you wouldn’t fill a ford transit van.
They would easily fit in a Wagon Queen Family Truckster.
That’s like two cards right?
Wait why aren’t they like iPhones where an activation server enables them post sale?
You can’t sell to China that way though
I would imagine the people spending millions upon millions buying these cards don't want to have to rely on NVIDIA to "allow" them to use the cards they spent millions upon millions on.
Like iPhone buyers if they don’t have a choice what are they going to do?
Toretto...
Let's assume that Lutnick, Trump and even Jensen Huang were all making money on the side by using their combined involvement to bypass export controls. The $25 million ballroom donation, and likely other forms of quid pro quo to be discovered by a pending investigation. If Trump was informed twice that she was a "spy" over the course of a year, and did nothing, and Lutnick failed to add Megaspeed and others to the export control lists, and the ballroom donation was made... It seems clear to assume that this lost shipment was also being tracked by the Feds and even more likely, they know exactly where it is now. The timing of it all would be too coincidental to not be connected. And if this is the case, all of the above were just caught red handed in an elaborate form of public corruption and quid pro quo that goes from nVidia, through the Commerce Dept and directly to the President. I'm sure there is much more to come on this story...
11M really is not enough to suspect a conspiracy of this scale.
It doesn't take a genius to figure out what a shipment with an Nvidia label to a warehouse contains.
Typically it's a bit harder than that as not every shipment is millions of dollars in stuff.
My father was a transportation manager for years, and his first rule is when expensive shipments are targeted and inexpensive are not it's an inside job.
Not sure why my original post is downvoted, it is following all publicly available information about this case so far.
This is just one shipment of several that would have been siphoned off over the past year or two.
Oh and another fact, news of the nVidia situation got out to investors and was the source of the recent broad market sell off, even though this was all insider trading based on information that has not been released publicly.
> 11M really is not enough to suspect a conspiracy of this scale.
That's how they fool the public, and people almost always take the bait. The above "$11M" is just one of many; the rest have not been discovered yet.
It's sort of like ants in your kitchen.
If "they" are in a position to control the narrative to this degree, then why bother disclosing the "$11M" theft at all? Why not just not report any of it, rather than artificially report about one of many and distort the value?
yeah seriously, this is just a Tuesday afternoon for Ziggy Sobotka
The big conspiracy is not $11m of hardware going missing in domestic US, its everyone from Jensen Huang to Trump knowing Huang's girlfriend was a Chinese spy and several mysterious shell companies with a front office that she was connected to in Singapore buying billions of dollars of chips. At least based on reporting so far.
edit : oh and possibly Lutnick and Nvidia covering it up
So perhaps there's another shoe to drop in terms of Nvidia (the DOJ case), and maybe Trump throws Lutnick under the bus when the heat piles on
> Let's assume that Lutnick, Trump and even Jensen Huang were all making money on the side by using their combined involvement to bypass export controls.
Let's not, and wait for evidence instead...keeping an eye on your assumption as indeed possible.
You can bet that Trump es making money in this. ([edit] not in this incident specifically, but in the whole Nvidia situation). Otherwise he’d be complaining loudly right now.
The GB202 RTX 5090 was discontinued, which had 32GB of DDR7 and was subject to export controls. Coincidentally, the GB202 RTX Pro 5500, which has 84GB of DDR7 suddenly was able to be produced and is somehow compliant with the export controls.
I'm not sure how to square this against there not being some funny business with the export controls.
If you are politically bypassing export controls you can ship billions of dollars of gear through normal channels. https://www.wyden.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/11122026wydenneal...
Your theory is like pointing at a story about a guy holding up a 7/11 in March 2009 and blaming it on Bernie Madoff.
Bypassing export controls is not this simple. In this case, it was the commerce secretary who slow rolled enforcement, likely due to some form of quid pro quo knowing the people involved and even extending to the $25 million ballroom donation..
They had to get around other Federal oversight that was trying to enforce the export controls. Bessent clarified as much on CNBC earlier today.
Still ain't nobody spending 25 million and filing false police reports to make a 7 million gain.
Someone in a food truck taking 6 pallets from a dock is a theft.
Someone currying favor to the tune of $25 million has billions to make.
Without Lord Jensen Huang, The Nvidia Empire is weak and vulnerable. The vultures have descended to scavenge before a new successor is sworn in. Take what you can, impoverished filth! You shall only incur the wrath of our new righteous GPU Emperor!
A few pallets of Nvidia hw also went missing in sao Paulo, brazil.
Better find out where Dominic Toretto is.
Ride or die.
Was it in the "FF 5"'s opening where they carjacked a tanker with ~$50k worth of diesel? Nowadays a 90 m³ trailer full of DDR5 RDIMMs would be what... $200M? $500M?
s/dvd players/gpus/ and you've got a reboot.
So six pallets of a shipment got stolen? Is this really news other than having Nvidia on the label?
Last sentence of the article “Regardless of how this shipment disappeared, carrier verification, shipment visibility and communication remain critical throughout transportation.”
Ugh the evidence suggests otherwise. You’d think $11M in high demand scarce cargo would get a little more attention as far as security goes.
Nobody in Oakland knows of the word "security".
I had my order for a bed frame from Amazon diverted to some guy's house two cities over a few months back. I'm sure that wasn't the only he "received."
96B in revenue... 11.4M stolen 0.01875%
If those things are not found someone is going to get F hard... by a spy
That’s 3 GPU’s gone forever
At current prices that is a quarter of a semi loaded with RTX 5090 boxes.
A single gamer’s pc gets stolen and it is news
With what we now know, it’s obvious that Huang organised this in collaboration with the Hong Kong triads, probably in exchange for cocaine and prostitutes.
Again?
> $11.4M in Nvidia hardware vanishes
2 video cards ?
Someone is now ready to run GTA VI
so like two chips? :)
I am bad at geography. Is Southern California close to China? Please help. ;-)
But anyhow, when it is a data-center GPU shipment then no need for trucks, a single van would do.
Oh no, it's Blue State on Blue State crime!