Thieves who stole PlusAI's Nvidia-branded trailer found 20,000 pounds of test sand

Fortune wrote that the thieves were "perhaps in search of precious AI loot" ^[14], and the branding theory rests on that perhaps. Authorities told PlusAI the thieves broke open the back of the trailers, found nothing of value and left them ^[4]. A trailer with Nvidia on its side is a fair guess at what drew them. The account does not show the logo was the reason, and two trailers left overnight at a Fremont warehouse ^[1][3] could have drawn opportunists without one.

The money in this story is Overhaul's count. The supply chain risk management firm has tracked more than $150 million in AI equipment cargo losses since it began collecting the data ^[8]. Some estimates put worldwide AI spending at $2.7 trillion this year ^[10]. Side by side, the losses come to about $56 for every $1 million spent, or 0.0056% ^[2]. Even that overstates the annual rate, because the loss figure is cumulative and the spending figure covers one year.

Theft is a small cost across the industry and a large one per shipment. In December 2024 thieves took more than $7 million of Nvidia chips from a California warehouse a day before a scheduled delivery to a Supermicro facility in San Jose ^[7]. That one job is roughly a twentieth of Overhaul's whole tally ^[3]. In June, Cook County sheriff's investigators recovered two trailers outside Chicago. The recovery included $300,000 of copper wire stolen in Alabama and $1 million of data center equipment reported stolen in Florida, $1.3 million in all ^[6][4].

Overhaul says AI-related theft is up 34% since 2024 and the value of goods stolen is up more than 110% over the same period ^[9]. If the first figure counts incidents and the second measures value in the same category, the average take per theft has grown by about 57% ^[1]. "The economics have become just crazy from the criminal opportunistic perspective," David Warrick, Overhaul's executive vice president, told Fortune earlier this year ^[15]. Fortune's report does not include insurance premiums or what carriers pay for tracking and escorts.

Warrick also described thieves who do not need to guess. "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," he said ^[11]. A crew with that knowledge would have known PlusAI's trailers held 40,000 pounds of sand used to simulate freight in testing ^[2][5]. The Fremont crew, which opened the doors and walked away, looks like the opportunist end of the trade.

The trend has more than one reading. If per-theft values keep outrunning incident counts, the cost falls hardest on whoever moves the most valuable loads, branded or not. Overhaul's growth could also partly reflect its own widening coverage, and the figures come from a firm whose business is managing that risk. Fortune ties the theft wave to smuggling into sanctioned countries such as China and Russia ^[16]. Epoch AI estimates smuggling supplied between 290,000 and 1.6 million Nvidia H100-equivalent chips by the end of 2025, about a third of China's compute stock. Epoch did not attribute those chips to cargo theft ^[12].

I think the first reading holds up best. AI cargo theft is a per-load security cost for anyone shipping chips and servers, and an Nvidia logo on a sand trailer says little about its size. A run of break-ins on branded trailers carrying nothing valuable would undercut that view, and so would Overhaul's value-per-theft figure going flat. For now carriers price the risk on their own. "But there's no standard industry-wide solution just yet," Lauren Kwan, PlusAI's vice president of marketing, said of tracking trailers and cargo ^[13].