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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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).
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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."
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.
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_...
You can't really dust for maple syrup.
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.
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.
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.
So you have tracking devices in the cab, the trailer, the pallets, and the boxes, and things STILL disappear.
Most logistics companies operate on shoestring IT budgets, and yet their software systems are juicy targets for organized crime, just like real estate companies.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/big-tech/data-cen...
Maybe there's going to be a GTA 6 mission based on this eventually..
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.
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.
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
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.
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.