A Truck Listed as a Food Hauler Picked Up $11.4 Million in Nvidia Hardware. Then It Vanished.

Six pallets of Nvidia hardware, worth $11.4 million, left Oakland on a truck that was supposed to take them to Fort Worth, Texas. They never arrived. The truck that picked them up was “identified as a food transport company,” according to ABC7 News. Investigators lost track of it in San Bernardino County.

Oakland police are investigating it as grand theft. No arrests have been announced.

What we know

• What: six pallets of Nvidia hardware valued at $11.4 million. Reports describe it as chips or GPUs, but no outlet has named the exact models.
• When: the shipment left Oakland on August 29. The victim reported the theft to Oakland police on September 13, and it became public this week.
• How: the load was picked up as planned, by a truck identified as a food transport company. Wccftech describes it as a commercial truck bearing a food transport company’s logo. The truck headed south, and investigators lost it in San Bernardino County.
• Who: police haven’t named the victim, the carrier or any suspects.

“Fake food truck”? Not quite

You’ll see headlines calling this a fake food truck. That goes further than the reporting. It wasn’t a food truck, but a freight truck from what appeared to be a food transport company. Tom’s Hardware says the truck was “posing as” one. But police haven’t said whether the company was fake, a real company whose name was borrowed, or a real carrier that went rogue. Until they do, we don’t know.

The two-week gap between pickup and police report also matters. Whoever took the load had a long head start.

Are the chips “worth double” now?

That claim comes from Olaf Groth, a professor at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, speaking to ABC7. He said high-end Nvidia chips “command about double the price” outside the US. His example was a chip costing about $550,000 in the US selling for about $1 million or more abroad.

That’s an expert’s general estimate, not a price anyone has seen for these chips. Nobody has reported where the stolen hardware went or what it has sold for. Groth’s bigger point: “we don’t know where these chips are going,” which he called a national security concern.

Not the first Bay Area Nvidia heist

ABC7 reports that police in Fremont and Union City investigated burglaries involving more than $7.5 million in Nvidia cargo last year. And in September, thieves went after trucks they believed were carrying Nvidia technology. Those turned out to hold 40,000 pounds of sand. AI hardware is now valuable enough to be a regular target for cargo thieves.

PCGeek’s take

The trick here wasn’t high-tech. Someone just showed up with a truck that looked right for the job and drove away. With a single pallet of AI hardware now worth more than most houses, shippers can’t treat it like ordinary freight. That means checking carriers, tracking every truck, and reporting a missing load in hours, not two weeks. For the rest of us, the risk is that stolen data center GPUs get sold on, so be careful buying second-hand pro or AI cards that look too cheap.

Image: NVIDIA press photo of a Blackwell GPU, for illustration. It isn’t the stolen hardware, which hasn’t been identified.

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