An Nvidia-branded trailer stolen from an autonomous trucking company turned out to be carrying sand rather than valuable artificial intelligence hardware. The incident nevertheless highlights the growing cargo-theft risks facing companies involved in the AI supply chain.

PlusAI confirmed that two trailers were stolen overnight last week from its warehouse in Fremont, Calif. One of the trailers carried Nvidia branding. Nvidia is the dominant supplier of the processors used to train and run AI systems, and its hardware is among the most sought-after technology in the global AI buildout. Although PlusAI uses Nvidia chips in its self-driving technology, the stolen trailers contained 40,000 pounds of sand—about 20,000 pounds in each vehicle.

Employees discovered the trailers were missing the following morning. Police recovered them later that day after a friend of PlusAI’s vice president of legal spotted the vehicles parked outside an office in Newark, Calif., and sent a photograph to the company. Authorities told PlusAI that the thieves had broken open the backs of the trailers, found nothing valuable and abandoned them.

PlusAI uses sand to simulate the loads its trailers are designed to carry during research and development testing. Transporting the material closely replicates real freight conditions.

Lauren Kwan, PlusAI’s vice president of marketing, told Fortune that the company had never previously had a tractor or trailer stolen since it was founded in 2016. “This was a first,” she said. Nvidia declined Fortune’s request for comment.

AI-related cargo theft increases

The PlusAI incident was unusual, but cargo theft targeting AI-related companies has been increasing. In June, investigators the Cook County Sheriff’s Office in Illinois recovered two trailers outside Chicago. One contained $300,000 worth of copper wire—a core material in electrical wiring and data center construction—stolen from Alabama and $1 million in data center equipment reported stolen in Florida.

In December 2024, thieves stole more than $7 million worth of Nvidia computer chips from a California warehouse. The shipment was scheduled for delivery to a Supermicro facility in San Jose the following day. Supermicro is a major manufacturer of servers used in AI data centers.

Supply-chain risk management firm Overhaul has tracked more than $150 million in AI-equipment cargo losses since it began collecting the data. AI-related theft—including theft of data center equipment and chips—increased 34% since 2024, while the total value of goods stolen rose by more than 110% during the same period.

Cargo theft has existed for centuries, but the scale of global AI investment has created a new target for criminals. Worldwide AI spending is projected to reach $2.7 trillion this year by some estimates. According to Overhaul executive vice president David Warrick, criminals are hijacking AI-related cargo for resale on the black market, taking advantage of strong demand for memory chips and infrastructure needed to build out AI systems.

The activity has created supply-chain disruption for technology and freight companies while offering substantial potential returns to 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.”

Efforts to combat cargo theft

The scale of heists involving hundreds of thousands of dollars in equipment taken from commercial trailers suggests the involvement of organized criminal groups rather than petty thieves. As the Trump administration takes action to ban exports of domestic AI technology, organized criminals see an opportunity to smuggle products into sanctioned countries such as China and Russia and sell them on the black market.

By the end of 2025, smuggling accounted for between 290,000 and 1.6 million Nvidia H100-equivalent chips, representing about one-third of China’s total compute stock, according to research institute Epoch AI. The institute did not attribute those 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.”

Freight companies are working on ways to address the problem. PlusAI is a software developer focused on self-driving technologies, but Kwan said cargo theft has long been a persistent issue for the trucking industry, which is seeking better ways to track trailers and cargo statuses.

“But there’s no standard industrywide solution just yet,” she said.

Overhaul uses AI to certify driver’s licenses, addressing a form of theft involving “ghost carriers.” These operators present themselves as legitimate freight companies but are actually smugglers. Overhaul has more than 30 billion data points and adds 250 million more each month 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.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.

Source: https://fortune.com/2026/10/01/nvidia-branded-truck-20000-pounds-sand-stolen-ai-cargo-theft-plusai/