Oakland police report no arrests two months after Nvidia cargo disappearance

A shipment of six Nvidia hardware pallets valued at $11.4 million disappeared while moving from Oakland, California, to Fort Worth, Texas, on Aug. 29, 2026. On Nov. 6, 2026, Oakland police said that two months after the disappearance they had made no arrests and recovered no cargo.

The cargo was picked up on schedule by a truck showing a food transportation company logo before the vehicle went off the grid. Investigators followed the truck through several multi-hour stops before losing track of it in San Bernardino County, California. Buyers learned in early September that the delivery never arrived, and Oakland police said they received a grand theft report regarding the shipment on Sept. 13, 2026. Authorities still have not confirmed which Nvidia product models were involved or how the theft was carried out.

Fremont and Union City police investigated earlier Nvidia cargo burglaries in 2025 with losses topping $7.5 million. VideoCardz said officials have not established a connection between those cases and the Oakland disappearance. Ars Technica said thieves have taken more than $100 million in similar hardware shipments since June, citing reporting by Ashley Belanger. Ars Technica reported that investigators cited by NBC News said criminals used GPS location spoofing and staged collisions with police escort vehicles, showing planning and sophistication.

Verisk CargoNet counted 677 supply-chain thefts across the United States and Canada in the second quarter of 2026, a 26% decline from 2025, and estimated losses for those thefts climbed from $135.7 million to $304.6 million versus the prior year. CargoNet said shipments of enterprise computing gear can be worth millions while moving as ordinary dry freight. CargoNet noted that its second-quarter 2026 industry totals were compiled before the Aug. 29 Oakland pickup and do not represent a local count.

The FBI defines strategic cargo theft as deception that tricks a shipper or carrier into releasing freight, including fake pickups and misuse of a carrier’s identity. An FBI IC3 advisory dated April 30 warns that criminals may seize carrier accounts, impersonate businesses, and redirect legitimate shipments elsewhere.

Olaf Groth, a professor at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, said on Nov. 6, 2026, that buyers overseas pay twice the domestic U.S. price for those chips. “These chips command about double the price that they command inside the United States,” Groth said. He said a single chip priced at roughly $550,000 can fetch $1 million or more overseas, and he warned that advanced computing hardware is a national security asset and an export risk to restricted regions. He added that diverted hardware could reach adversary states, pointing to evidence that restricted Nvidia parts have shown up in China despite export controls.

VideoCardz estimated an average declared value of about $1.9 million per pallet across the six pallets worth $11.4 million. In a separate California incident, thieves took two NVIDIA-branded PlusAI trailers expecting costly hardware and found roughly 40,000 pounds of sand used for autonomous truck testing; both trailers were later recovered after being abandoned. In September, about $470,000 in two pallets of ZOTAC GeForce RTX 5090 graphics cards disappeared from Guarulhos International Airport in São Paulo; the shipment belonged to distributor Oderço. Brazilian police suspected three airport workers in the Guarulhos RTX 5090 theft, and a missing card later appeared in an online listing priced near $6,400 with a matching serial number.

ABC7 reported that experts described the Oakland theft as a sophisticated cargo heist targeting one of the world’s most valuable technology companies. Groth said Nvidia chips are in high demand and offer many incentives to hijack them wherever security is weak, and he said the growing scale and complexity of cargo heists point toward professional teams carrying them out. He said stolen chips could end up in China or any conflict zone, calling the unknown destination a national security concern. An ABC7 viewer submitted video of a separate attempted theft in September.

Police said the suspects believed they were targeting trucks carrying costly Nvidia gear, but those trucks held 40,000 pounds of sand. ABC7 reported that experts say the case raises concerns about the security of high-value technology shipments and the national security implications of advanced hardware reaching the black market. BigGo Finance said the gap of more than two weeks before the Sept. 13 theft report gave perpetrators time to disperse the equipment. Ars Technica reported that stolen components can be stripped and sold in gray-market deals or shipped overseas where U.S. tech hardware access may be restricted.

Chicago authorities recovered roughly $1.3 million of equipment in June 2026 after GPS trackers helped locate the goods. Criminals have increasingly turned to GPS manipulation and other countermeasures. Some crews working cargo thefts ram private escort vehicles that follow high-value loads, while other crews rely on phishing and hacking to impersonate legitimate carriers.

Shippers are spending more on monitoring services and license-plate-reading cameras to spot suspicious vehicles. BigGo Finance said concealing what cargo holds is a common defensive tactic, but the food-company branding did not stop the thieves, and said the Nvidia logo has become a magnet for criminals. BigGo Finance called the losses a rounding error compared with Nvidia’s data-center revenue.

BigGo Finance said a stolen load can delay commissioning of a hyperscaler or cloud provider‘s facility because GPU deliveries are scheduled months in advance. BigGo Finance said thefts raise insurance and logistics costs across the AI supply chain, and those costs feed into the price of compute. BigGo Finance said demand for AI accelerators is outpacing controlled distribution channels, supporting Nvidia’s pricing power even as regulators tighten export rules.

Hoodline said the food-company logo alone is not proof of company involvement. In the 2025 Fremont and Union City burglaries, police said the suspects’ vehicles came from Southern California and that the group traveled to the Bay Area to commit the crimes.

Fremont police received the report just after 9:30 a.m. that two PlusAI trailers had gone missing, with locks apparently forced off and cabs parked elsewhere left untouched. Hoodline reported that the theft occurred late on Sept. 23 and the discovery came on Sept. 24. Newark officers brought back both PlusAI trailers, which still contained all 40,000 pounds of sand used as a simulated load for testing handling and braking.

Lauren Kwan, a PlusAI marketing executive, confirmed that one trailer carried PlusAI and Nvidia branding and said she believed the branding drew thieves. Kwan said police believe thieves opened the backs of the trailers before abandoning the rigs.