Thieves Have Stolen Over $100 Million in AI Data Center Equipment Since June

Someone is stealing AI infrastructure straight off America's highways, and they're doing it with the precision of a heist movie rather than a smash-and-grab.

According to an NBC News investigation, thieves have made off with more than $100 million worth of data center equipment since June, targeting shipments of server racks, copper wiring, fiber optic cable, RAM, and storage drives as they move across the country toward the construction sites feeding the AI boom.

Two incidents detailed in the report show how far some of these crews are willing to go. In one, a shipment of $13 million in server equipment was crossing a stretch of interstate through the Mojave Desert when another vehicle rammed its security escort, forcing the convoy to stop. The trailer turned up later at a truck yard in California, empty. Gerado Pachucha, a former member of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department's cargo crime unit, told NBC the collision was no accident: "The bad guys wanted that load, so they intentionally took out the escorts."

A second theft followed the same playbook. A security vehicle was rammed, and a trailer carrying an estimated $10 million in server rack components disappeared.

Gold bars on wheels

The scale of what's being lifted has caught the attention of cargo-theft specialists who track this kind of crime for a living. Keith Lewis, head of operations at Verisk CargoNet, compared the stolen freight to precious metal. "It's like stealing pure gold bars," he told NBC, noting that some individual thefts have climbed past $30 million. "We've seen some of these thefts go up into 30-plus million dollars for one particular shipment. It's so much easier to steal this than to rob a bank."

The targets track directly with what it takes to build a data center. Lewis described copper, server racks, and RAM as the "precursors" to construction, which is why thieves are increasingly drawn to them. It's not that this freight is new to supply chains, it's that the price tag attached to it has exploded alongside the AI buildout, making a single trailer worth far more than it used to be.

That math is reshaping incentives for organized crime. Scott Cornell, who chairs the Americas division of the Transported Asset Protection Association, told NBC these aren't improvised jobs. "These are extremely high-level organized rings that are operating from a dozen different countries, targeting freight in the United States supply chain," he said. "They're planned. They're plotted. They're strategic. They're playing chess in the supply chain."

Not just highway robbery

The physical hijackings are the most dramatic version of the problem, but they're not the only one. The FBI issued a warning in April about what it calls "cyber-enabled strategic cargo theft," a scheme in which criminals spoof freight brokers' email addresses to infiltrate cargo booking systems and bid on legitimate loads. Once they win a shipment, the freight gets "cross-docked" or "transloaded" with the help of complicit drivers, who move it to a separate location where it can be resold.

Investigators who spoke with NBC see the ramming incidents as potentially the leading edge of something bigger: a shift toward the kind of violent, highly coordinated cargo theft tactics more commonly associated with freight crime outside the US. And data centers aren't the only cargo at risk as that escalation plays out, though the sheer value of AI infrastructure freight has made it an especially attractive target.

The response so far

States including Arizona, California, Tennessee, and Illinois have set up dedicated cargo theft task forces to respond to the trend, according to the report. Private security firms say demand for escort services from data center logistics companies is climbing. At the federal level, a bill aimed at broader organized retail crime is currently under debate in Congress.

The data center boom has already strained power grids, drawn environmental scrutiny, and sparked local pushback over noise and water use. Add this to the list: the equipment required to build the AI economy has become valuable enough that criminal networks are now willing to run security convoys off the road to get it. As long as that equipment keeps commanding eight-figure price tags per shipment, it's hard to see the incentive disappearing anytime soon.