Thieves Spoofed GPS to Steal a $13 Million Server Load: Over $100 Million of Data Center Freight Has Vanished Since June

The AI buildout has created a class of freight so valuable that stealing it now beats robbing a bank. According to an NBC News investigation published Monday, thieves have made off with more than $100 million of data center freight since June, and the two largest heists show how organized the crews have become.

In the first case, a trailer carrying several hundred pounds of computer server equipment worth $13 million was headed to Fayetteville, Georgia, home to one of the largest data center developments in the country. Two off-duty officers hired as escorts lost the trailer after an unmarked sedan deliberately struck their car and forced them to stop. "The accident was not an accident. The bad guys wanted that load, so they intentionally took out the escorts," Gerardo Pachuca, a private investigator and former Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy, told NBC News. About three weeks later, a trailer with roughly $10 million of server rack components left California for Texas. Its escort was struck by an SUV, the trailer sped off — and its GPS tracking coordinates had been spoofed, so monitors watched a truck that was not there.

Most jobs start online, not on the highway. Thieves phish or hack freight brokers' accounts on shipment-listing platforms, post fake loads to collect bids from real trucking companies, then send those companies a malicious link that surrenders account control. From there they bid on genuine shipments, collect the cargo with a complicit or duped driver, and resell the gear. AI-generated fake driver licenses have made it easier to place accomplices inside carrier fleets. "That's how most of it is being done," said Sgt. David Pantoja of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department.

What disappears reads like a data center bill of materials: servers, fiber-optic and copper cabling, memory chips, drives and even bitcoin mining machines. Two recovered loads in Illinois contained about $300,000 of copper wire spools and roughly $1 million of custom-made modular power equipment. In another case, data center cooling equipment bound for DeepCool AI turned up in a trailer packed among nicotine pouches, televisions and cosmetics. Since 2025, nearly two dozen cargo theft incidents have hit states including California, Texas and Utah, and the single largest haul — $38 million — disappeared in Reno, Nevada.

The economics explain the escalation. Verisk CargoNet, which tracks cargo crime, counted 26% fewer cargo theft incidents in the second quarter of 2026 than a year earlier, yet the value of goods stolen more than doubled. "It's like stealing pure gold bars," said Keith Lewis, head of operations at Verisk CargoNet. "It's so much easier to steal this than to rob a bank."

Unlike consumer goods, data center equipment rarely surfaces on open online marketplaces. Investigators believe buyers are lined up before loads are taken, and that much of the hardware flows overseas, including to countries under US AI export controls. Scott Cornell of TAPA Americas estimates six or seven of every ten stolen loads leave the United States. "These are international syndicates. They run like big corporations," said David Warrick of supply chain risk firm Overhaul. "They have penetrated the supply chains at all levels."

The industry's fixes are unglamorous — digital bills of lading, faster theft reporting, actual carrier vetting — but the deeper point is that the AI infrastructure boom has extended its attack surface to American highways. Every $100 million of stolen servers and memory is another line item in the cost of the buildout, and another argument for treating a rack of GPUs like a gold shipment.