NBC: $100M+ in AI Data Center Freight Stolen on US Highways

In early June, a trailer carrying roughly $13 million in computer server equipment vanished while heading east toward Fayetteville, Georgia, which NBC News calls "home to one of the largest data center developments in the country." NBC puts the running total above $100 million in data center freight stolen since June.

The tactics span the physical and the digital. In two of the largest heists, off-duty cops hired to escort the shipments were targeted in hit-and-runs, and none of the equipment was ever recovered. Elsewhere, criminals infiltrated freight-broker email accounts to find lucrative shipments, misdirected loads, disrupted GPS tracking, and used AI to generate fake driver's licenses so accomplices could get hired as delivery drivers.

Stolen gear on these corridors includes "servers, fiber-optic cables, computer memory chips, copper wires, and bitcoin mining machines," per NBC. Hyperscale buildouts pull long tails of commodity hardware alongside the headline GPU boxes.

"We've seen a big concentration around the theft of high-tech loads," Scott Cornell, chair of TAPA Americas and crime and theft specialist at SPG Cargo & Logistics, told FreightWaves, which pegged the running total at $110.6 million since June 3. Cornell estimated that "six or seven out of every 10 loads stolen in the U.S. now leave the country," routed through established criminal distribution networks rather than warehoused locally.

Not every load stays gone. Sgt. David Pantoja of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department recovered data center cooling equipment destined for Deepcool AI stashed alongside unrelated stolen cargo including nicotine pouches, televisions and skin care cosmetics. In Cook County, Illinois, investigators recovered $300,000 of copper wire spools and about $1 million of custom data center modular power equipment. Supply-side exposure now sits next to permitting and GPU pricing on our AI infrastructure feed, which has logged 445 stories in the last 90 days.