Crooks Target AI Data Center Equipment Shipments in $100 Million Crime Wave

In early June, a trailer carrying roughly $13 million worth of computer server equipment set out across the Mojave Desert toward Fayetteville, Georgia, with an unmarked sedan trailing behind it, carrying two off-duty law enforcement officers hired to watch over the load. The truck was headed towards a sophisticated theft, part of a $100 million crime wave targeting tech gear headed for AI data centers.

NBC News reports that the escort vehicle never made it. Another car rammed the sedan on the interstate, forcing it to stop, while the trailer kept moving. It turned up a day later at a truck yard in Stockton, California, close to where the shipment had originally been picked up. The data center equipment, loaded onto pallets, had vanished.

“The accident was not an accident. The bad guys wanted that load, so they intentionally took out the escorts,” said Gerardo Pachuca, who spent nearly two decades on the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s cargo criminal apprehension team before launching his own private investigation firm. The truck driver may have been part of the plot by using a fake driver’s license, according to industry experts studying fraud and theft in logistics.

Three weeks later, it happened again. A trailer hauling server rack components worth about $10 million left San Jose, California, bound for a Texas data center project, its cargo tracked by an app and shadowed by a security escort. An SUV struck the security team’s car in what looked like a staged hit-and-run, and the trailer drove on without its chaperone. The delivery never arrived. The tracking coordinates appeared to have been spoofed. Neither shipment has been recovered.

Since June, thieves have made off with more than $100 million in data center freight, according to industry leaders, consultants and investigators. NBC News identified nearly two dozen cargo theft incidents involving high-end technology since last year, in states including California, Texas and Utah. In July, drivers using fake licenses stole roughly $38 million worth of cables and cartridges in Reno, Nevada, cargo that was scheduled to be flown overseas to Asia.

In June, Cook County Sheriff’s Office investigator Michael Kruzel traced a trailer stolen from Pine Hill, Alabama, to a truck yard in northern Illinois, where a second stolen trailer also turned up nearby. Together they held $1.3 million in copper wire spools and custom data center modular power equipment headed for a Texas infrastructure project. In April, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department recovered stolen data center cooling equipment at a warehouse that also held stolen nicotine pouches, televisions, apparel and speakers.

“It’s like stealing pure gold bars,” said Keith Lewis, head of operations at the risk-assessment firm Verisk CargoNet. “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.” Lewis said the equipment driving the surge is specific: “Things that are precursors for the AI data centers: copper, server racks and RAM. Those are the things that are the precursors to build one, so that’s what we’re seeing the big increase in.”

AI data centers and the integration of this technology is changing the political landscape as well as the economy and crime. Breitbart News social media director Wynton Hall has written his New York Times bestseller Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI to serve as the definitive guide on how the MAGA movement can create positions on AI that benefit humanity without handing control of our nation to the leftists of Silicon Valley or allowing the Chinese to take over the world.

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