Thieves Have Taken More Than $100 Million of Data Center Freight Since June, Often With Staged Crashes, NBC Reports
Breitbart summarizes an NBC News investigation: copper, server racks and RAM are the targets, drivers used fake licenses, and two big shipments have not been recovered.
The build-out of AI data centers has produced a new kind of cargo crime, Breitbart reports, summarizing an NBC News investigation.
The thefts. In early June, a trailer carrying about $13 million of server equipment was headed from the Mojave Desert to Fayetteville, Georgia, trailed by an unmarked sedan with two off-duty officers. Another car rammed the sedan, the trailer kept going and it turned up a day later at a truck yard in Stockton, California, empty. Three weeks later, a trailer with about $10 million of server rack parts left San Jose for a Texas data center project. An SUV struck its escort car in what looked like a staged hit-and-run, and the tracking coordinates appeared to be spoofed. Neither load has been recovered.
The scale. Industry leaders, consultants and investigators told NBC more than $100 million in data center freight has been stolen since June. NBC counted nearly two dozen incidents involving high-end technology since last year, in California, Texas, Utah and other states. In July, drivers with fake licenses stole about $38 million of cables and cartridges in Reno, Nevada, headed to Asia.
The targets. Keith Lewis, head of operations at the risk firm Verisk CargoNet, said the thieves want "things that are precursors for the AI data centers: copper, server racks and RAM." He said some single loads top $30 million: "It's like stealing pure gold bars." In June, a Cook County Sheriff's investigator traced a stolen trailer from Alabama to a truck yard in northern Illinois, where a second stolen trailer sat nearby. Together they held $1.3 million of copper wire and custom power equipment.
The investigators. Gerardo Pachuca, a private investigator who spent nearly two decades on the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department's cargo criminal apprehension team, said of the first crash: "The accident was not an accident."
Note for readers: the dollar totals come from industry sources quoted by NBC and are not a government count. We have not read the NBC report ourselves, only Breitbart's summary.