Thieves Steal Nvidia-Branded Truck, Find 40,000 Pounds of Sand

Thieves who stole two trailers from autonomous trucking company PlusAI last week, one of them Nvidia-branded, got away with 40,000 pounds of sand. The haul points to a bigger problem: supply chain risk firm Overhaul has tracked more than $150 million in AI equipment cargo losses, with AI-related theft up 34% since 2024.

PlusAI confirmed the two trailers were stolen from its Fremont, California warehouse overnight. Workers discovered them missing the next morning. Police recovered the trailers later that day after a friend of PlusAI's vice president of legal spotted them parked outside a Newark office and sent a photo. Authorities told the company the thieves broke open the back of the vehicles, found nothing of value, and left them.

The thieves may have hoped for a different kind of cargo. PlusAI uses Nvidia chips in its self-driving technology, but the trailers carried no chips — only sand, roughly 20,000 pounds in each truck. PlusAI uses the material to simulate the loads its trailers must carry, because weight closely mimics real freight conditions during research and development testing. Nvidia declined Fortune's request for comment.

"This was a first," Lauren Kwan, vice president of marketing at PlusAI, told Fortune. Since the company's founding in 2016, it has never had a tractor or trailer stolen.

AI cargo theft is rising fast

While a first for PlusAI, cargo theft targeting AI companies has accelerated. In June, investigators with the Cook County Sheriff's Office in Illinois recovered two trailers outside Chicago, including one containing $300,000 in copper wires stolen from Alabama and $1 million in data center equipment reported stolen in Florida. In December 2024, thieves took more than $7 million worth of Nvidia computer chips from a California warehouse, just one day before the products were scheduled for delivery to a Supermicro facility in San Jose.

Overhaul has tracked more than $150 million in AI equipment cargo losses since it began collecting the data. AI-related theft, including data center equipment and chips, has increased 34% since 2024. Over the same period, the total value of goods stolen has risen by more than 110%.

Cargo theft has existed for centuries. But with worldwide AI spending projected to reach $2.7 trillion this year by some estimates, thieves have found a new target: hijacking AI-related cargo to resell on the black market, taking advantage of steep demand for memory chips and infrastructure buildout, according to Overhaul Executive Vice President David Warrick. The result is supply chain chaos for tech and freight companies — and a big payday for thieves.

"The economics have become just crazy from the criminal opportunistic perspective," Warrick told Fortune earlier this year. "As the world pours a trillion dollars in there, and everybody's spending a lot of money, the criminals are saying, 'What a great opportunity; you need to be part of this.' That's the way it works."

Organized crime, not petty theft

The scale of these heists — hundreds of thousands of dollars in equipment lifted from commercial trailers — points to organized criminals, not opportunists. As the Trump administration moves to ban exports of domestic AI technology, organized criminals see a chance to smuggle these products into sanctioned countries like China and Russia and sell them on the black market.

Smuggling is already vast. By the end of 2025, it accounted for between 290,000 and 1.6 million Nvidia H100-equivalent chips, making up about one-third of China's total compute stock, according to research institute Epoch AI. Epoch AI did not attribute the smuggled chips to cargo theft.

"When we say organized crime, we actually mean organized crime," Warrick said. "These are international syndicates. They run like big corporations…They have penetrated the supply chains at all levels, in terms of drivers, in terms of warehouse operators. They know where all the high value goods are, they know who transacts them, and they look for the weak points in the supply chain to be able to exploit those."

Fighting back

Freight companies are searching for ways to fight back. Kwan said cargo theft has been a persistent problem for the truck industry, which is looking for better ways to track trailers and cargo statuses.

"But there's no standard industry-wide solution just yet," she said.

Overhaul has turned to AI itself, using it to certify driver's licenses. Theft often takes the shape of "ghost carriers" — operators that pose as legitimate freighters but are actually smugglers. The company holds more than 30 billion data points, adding 250 million monthly, to track cargo with AI.

"We're having to evolve not only with technology," Warrick said, "but because we understand that this is an arms race."

For PlusAI, the sand caper ended with recovered trailers and a lesson in what a brand name can attract. For the broader AI supply chain, the incident is a reminder that as AI spending climbs toward the trillions, every Nvidia-branded asset on the road is now a target — and the industry still lacks a standardized way to protect it.