Cargo pirates, perhaps searching for valuable AI loot, found a very different kind of loot after stealing two trailers from an autonomous transportation company: sand, and lots of it.
Trucking company PlusAI confirmed that two trailers were stolen from its Fremont, California warehouse last week, including one with Nvidia Branding on it. While PlusAI uses Nvidia chips for its self-driving technology, the trailers were not carrying those chips, but rather 40,000 pounds of sand.
The theft happened overnight: Workers discovered the missing trailers the next morning, and police found them later that day after a friend of PlusAI’s vice president of legal affairs happened to spot them parked outside a Newark office and sent a photo. Authorities told the company that the thieves broke into the back of the vehicles, found nothing of value and left them behind.
PlusAI uses sand to simulate the loads its trailers must carry to support research and development testing, as transporting the material closely mimics real-world freight conditions. Each truck loaded approximately 20,000 pounds of sand.
Lauren Kwan, vice president of marketing at PlusAI, said Assets that a tractor or trailer has never been stolen since the company was founded in 2016: “That was a first.” Nvidia refused AssetsPlease comment.
The rise of AI-driven cargo theft
Although a first for PlusAI, cargo theft targeting AI companies is on the rise. In June, investigators worked with the Cook County Sheriff’s Office in Illinois two trailers recovered outside Chicago, including one that contained $300,000 worth of copper wires stolen from Alabama and $1 million worth of data center equipment stolen in Florida. In December 2024, thieves stole Nvidia computer chips worth more than $7 million from a warehouse in California just a day before the products were scheduled to be delivered to a Supermicro facility in San Jose.
Supply chain risk management company Overhaul has already been tracking this More than $150 million in freight losses on AI equipment Since data tracking began, AI-related theft, including data center equipment and chips, has increased 34% since 2024. The total value of stolen goods increased by more than 110% over the same period.
Cargo theft has been around for centuries, albeit with global AI output expected to reach $2.7 trillion Thieves are estimated to have found a new target this year: hijacking AI-related cargo to resell on the black market, taking advantage of high demand for memory chips and expanding infrastructure, according to David Warrick, executive vice president of Overhaul. The result? Supply chain chaos for tech and freight companies and a big payday for thieves.
“The economy has just gone crazy from a criminal opportunistic perspective,” Warrick said told Assets Earlier this year. “As the world puts in a trillion dollars and everyone spends a lot of money, the criminals say, ‘What a great opportunity; you have to be a part of it.’ That’s how it works.”
Combating cargo theft
The sheer scale of these robberies, which involved hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment from commercial trailers, points not to petty theft but to organized criminals. As the Trump administration takes measures to ban exports As domestic AI technology becomes more widespread, organized criminals see an opportunity to smuggle these products into sanctioned countries such as China and Russia and sell them on the black market. Smuggling was responsible until the end of 2025 between 290,000 and 1.6 million Nvidia H100 equivalent chipsAccording to research institute Epoch AI, they account for about a third of China’s total computer inventory, although they do not attribute these smuggled chips to cargo theft.
“When we talk about organized crime, we actually mean organized crime,” Warrick said. “These are international syndicates. They operate like large corporations… They have penetrated supply chains at every level, both in terms of drivers and warehouse operators. They know where all the high-value goods are, they know who is handling them, and they look for vulnerabilities in the supply chain to exploit.”
Trucking companies are trying to combat this growing problem. While PlusAI is a software developer working on self-driving technologies, Kwan said cargo theft is an ongoing problem for the trucking industry, which is looking for solutions to better track trailers and load status.
“But there is no industry-wide standard solution yet,” she said.
Overhaul has relied on AI to certify driver’s licenses because thefts often take the form of “ghost trucks” that pose as legitimate freighters but are actually smugglers. The company has more than 30 billion data points, 250 million of which are added monthly to track freight using AI.
“We need to evolve not just with the technology,” Warrick said, “but understanding that this is an arms race.”