The AI gold rush is replicating a sort of “21st century American Wild West” with all the elements of a good west. There are gold mines, data centers, fortune seekers willing to buy shovels with pocketfuls of money, and all the ingredients needed to get gold metal that now comes in data format. The highwaymen were absent from completing a Wild West scene, but they arrived.
Perseverance, this time, is a trailer loaded with equipment to equip a data center. Just like the American woman said NBC NewsThe new loot is servers, copper cables for installation and memory chips. And thieves don’t thrive: They deliberately pick the load long before the truck leaves its warehouse and intercept it before it reaches its destination.
More than 100 million since June. It is estimated that, as of June 3, the known theft of technical cargo totaled $110.6 million. As I have gathered Freightwaves With data from Scott Cornell, president of the Transported Asset Protection Association (TAPA America) and executive vice president of SPG Cargo & Logistics and a crime and theft expert, thefts range from $2 million to $38 million. In Illinois, the Cook County sheriff recovered two trailers containing $1.3 million in copper and data center equipment.
In recent months, the number of thefts has actually decreased, but the economic loss due to the theft of each of their transported hardware components has increased. Verisk Cargonet Agency recorded 677 incidents in the second quarter of 2026, down 26% from a year earlier. Stolen cargo losses rose from $135.7 million to $304.6 million. Its vice president of operations, Keith Lewis, emphasized that, “a low incidence should not be confused with a low risk of theft.”
A fake email opens doors. However, these attacks on trucks delivering data center components are not spontaneous. The FBI warned in April that criminals impersonate transportation companies with fake emails and links. Through these attacks, cybercriminals infiltrate the systems of transport and logistics companies
With these fake accounts, they publish false offers on freight exchanges, portals where transport orders are advertised and bid on. They then receive the original shipment in the company’s name, change the destination and deliver the merchandise to drivers they don’t suspect, but who actually belong to the gang. That is, the truck is not robbed during its route, but the hardware distributors themselves help load their thieves’ trucks.
When the load is worth more than the truck. A truck full of servers can cost millions of dollars, and travel with no more security measures than a load of fans. The colonel said that “if the drivers are bad guys, when they hit the Escort, the drivers go away.” And he added: “Drivers are not well vetted.” Logistics, with its paperwork and escort, has become the weakest link in the chain.
Because of this, the security of these convoys started to be strengthened. In June, according to NBC News, a car intentionally hit the escort of a transport bound for a data center. Its hardware was $13 million. On that occasion, the truck managed to escape, but just a few weeks later, another convoy in Texas with a shipment worth $10 million suffered the same fate.
RAM rustler. We didn’t see it coming about the RAM rustlers, but their business makes sense. Manufacturers prioritized supply of components for servers, creating hardware shortages that drove up prices and availability, which in turn drove up prices.
According to TrendForce estimates, DDR5 memory for servers will grow between 93% and 98% in the first quarter of 2026. For the fourth quarter, it expects another 10% to 15% growth in conventional DRAM. The little that is produced is reserved for long-term contracts. Google vice president Shakeel Barkat admitted that “we haven’t seen memory prices go up the way we’re going right now.” Thus, the memory is of interest to commercial thieves and is easy to hide. The colonel claimed that “I could only disguise it by falsifying the papers.”
As for who is buying the stolen goods, the head of SPG Cargo and Logistics does not hesitate to say that “they have customers, they have a customer base and they are fulfilling orders.” According to their estimates, six or seven out of every ten loads stolen in the US leave the country and are installed in data centers outside the US.
In Xataka | Sam Altman, CEO of ChatGPT: “It’s scary that people’s PCs only have RAM that’s used 5% of the time”
Picture | Unsplash (Nishat Samadzai)
