Have you been watching many heist movies lately? Here's a Hollywood-ready script for a new one: Organized crime teams have taken to stealing data center gear off or with their transport trucks, to the tune of tens of millions per shipment. They employ hacking and phishing, vehicular ramming, GPS signal spoofing, and have ties to international crime networks. An extensive report on NBC sheds light on this new trend, remarking that over $100 million dollars of computing and related gear were stolen via transit interception in various guises since June 2026 alone.
This type of heist has been growing over the past couple of years, but just this year the one incident in Reno made $38 million in gear disappear. In the same city, $15m of semiconductors and Apple products got nabbed in July 2025, according to Fortune. The month of June 2026 was particularly profitable for thieves, as they made off with $13m of gear around the Mojave Desert area, and $10m worth of server rack components headed to Texas.
The stolen gear includes servers, fiber-optic and copper cabling, RAM modules, drives, routers, and other miscellaneous gear. Although NBC doesn't mention GPUs by name, stolen data center servers headed for AI buildouts are likely to have some.
Even copper wire is worth a lot these days, as one snagged trailer had $300,000 worth of the now-precious metal.
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