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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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).
> 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.
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”.
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.
According to ChatGPT, the expected merchandise value of a random fully loaded truck is $35,000–$40,000. Armored trucks that transport cash rarely carry more than $1 million. So yes, it's a lot and most likely a targeted theft.
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.
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?
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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...
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
> 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.
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...
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.
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?
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.
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.
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!
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?
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."
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.
While probably harder to find a no-questions asked buyer, the price premium on GPUs is a lot higher than some consoles.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto_Pearson_International_...
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.
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.
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.
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/24/chinaf-f35-components-hong-k...
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
2/ why would the FBI get involved in local police matters?
This is the point Jensen staked his legacy on, he will be proved right.
When the company doesn't care, the insurance still cares.
When the police don't care, the insurance still cares.
Insurance always cares.
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
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.
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.
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 ?
It doesn't take a genius to figure out what a shipment with an Nvidia label to a warehouse contains.
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.
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.
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.
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 not, and wait for evidence instead...keeping an eye on your assumption as indeed possible.
I'm not sure how to square this against there not being some funny business with the export controls.
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.
They had to get around other Federal oversight that was trying to enforce the export controls. Bessent clarified as much on CNBC earlier today.
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.
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.
2 video cards ?
But anyhow, when it is a data-center GPU shipment then no need for trucks, a single van would do.