Thieves steal Nvidia-branded trailers expecting valuable hardware, find 40,000 pounds of sand instead

Facepalm: If you were a thief with a penchant for stealing vehicles, a couple of trailers emblazoned with Nvidia logos are going to be tempting targets. Sadly for the criminals who did steal these two units, they never contained hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of GPUs; each one was filled with 20,000 pounds of sand.

The thieves’ mistake was that the trailers had more than just Nvidia’s logo on them: they also bore the name PlusAI, an autonomous truck startup that is working with Nvidia on its self-driving technology and AI software.

Rather than hauling around very expensive Nvidia equipment, PlusAI simulates how the cargo loads react to road conditions by packing its semi-trailers with sand. A lot of sand.

“PlusAI uses simulated loads in its trailers to assist with research and development testing,” Lauren Kwan, a company spokesperson, told Wired.

It was only discovered that the trailers had been stolen when a friend of a top PlusAI executive saw them near their workplace in Newark, California, and rang the exec to congratulate them on their success.

This set off alarm bells as the trailers weren’t supposed to be in that location. As far as the company knew, they were docked outside its warehouse, half a mile away.

It appears that the thieves hooked up the trailers to their own cabs and drove off. When they stopped to see what incredibly valuable goods they’d pilfered, one can only imagine their disappointment at finding half a beach in each container. It’s believed that they then simply left after breaking open the doors, abandoning the units.

The case is currently under investigation by police, and no arrests have been made. Nvidia has yet to respond to a request for comment.

The AI boom and resulting increase in data center hardware prices have made the technology a prime target for thieves. It was reported in August that two recent cases involved criminals appearing to have used car crashes to separate trucks from their security escorts before the shipments vanished, suggesting the drivers may have also been part of the heist.

In June, California Highway Patrol recovered more than $2.2 million in merchandise allegedly stolen in three separate incidents. The recovery included eight pallets of Celestica server switches made for Meta, valued at $550,000.

We’ve also seen truck heists in which Switch 2 consoles, Oculus VR headsets, Apple products, and graphics cards were stolen, all of which were worth a lot more than sand.