A trailer parked in a truck yard near Chicago held about $300,000 worth of copper wire spools. Investigators with the Cook County Sheriff’s Office found it last week, according to Business Insider, and it had been reported stolen in Pine Hill, Alabama.
It was not the only one. The yard’s owner said the same driver had left another stolen trailer there a week earlier, carrying roughly $1 million of data center equipment taken from Jacksonville, Florida. Together the two loads came to $1.3 million. The sheriff’s office said so in a social media post.
The copper trailer was located through its GPS tracker, Tom’s Hardware reported, citing Freight Pulse. Its tags had been swapped for ones from Indiana, probably to hide where it came from. How the equipment trailer was discovered is unclear.
Organized crime, not opportunists
Fortune says the heists are part of a larger black market built around AI hardware. David Warrick, executive vice president of supply-chain risk firm Overhaul, said it appeared almost as soon as ChatGPT launched and picked up speed three to five years ago, alongside the data center buildout. A projected $7 trillion data center market is the backdrop.
“The economics have become just crazy from the criminal opportunistic perspective,” Warrick told Fortune. “As the world pours a trillion dollars in there, and everybody’s spending a lot of money, the criminals are saying, ‘What a great opportunity; you need to be part of this.’”
He rejects the idea of casual thieves grabbing spools of wire. “When we say organized crime, we actually mean organized crime,” he said, describing international syndicates that “run like big corporations” and have reached drivers and warehouse operators. Warrick said the rings smuggle goods to places such as China, Russia and Iran, where the U.S. government has tried to block exports of American AI technology. The Financial Times reported last month that the black-market price of Nvidia’s RTX 6000 Pro workstation chip in China had more than doubled since the start of the year.
The numbers
Verisk CargoNet put cargo theft at $725 million in 2025. In the first three months of this year alone there were 767 incidents, with $132 million in stolen goods. The number of incidents fell from 3,854 in 2024 to 3,594 in 2025, but the average value of stolen goods climbed from around $200,000 to nearly $275,000. Overhaul says electronics made up 22% of all thefts last year.
Past cases show the scale. Reno police said a shipment managed by Ceva Logistics, holding about $15 million in semiconductors and Apple products, was stolen last July. The empty trailer turned up two weeks later in California, about 280 miles away. In December 2024, thieves took more than $7 million in Nvidia chips from a California warehouse within a day of their scheduled delivery to a Supermicro facility in San Jose.
Tom’s Hardware doubts that servers themselves are easy to sell. Buyers are mostly institutions that would want receipts and warranties, and serial numbers let a purchaser check the equipment’s status with the manufacturer. Consumer electronics are easier to move.
The FBI warned in April about cyber actors who impersonate legitimate businesses to hijack freight and reroute deliveries. Warrick added that ghost carriers and fraudulent pickups are also used. Logistics firms are responding with software that checks driver’s licenses and paperwork and with generative AI to track cargo. “We’re having to evolve not only with technology,” Warrick said, “but because we understand that this is an arms race.”
Sources
- Organized crime is building an AI hardware cargo theft economy: 'The economics have become just crazy from the criminal opportunistic perspective' | Fortune
- Cargo thieves target AI data center supplies in $1.3 million heists
