Six Nvidia pallets worth $11.4M left Oakland in August and vanished

Six pallets of Nvidia hardware left Oakland for Fort Worth, Texas, on 29 August in a truck carrying a food transport company's logo. The load disappeared somewhere on the way. The Bay Area News Group put the cargo at $11.4 million in the first published account, on 4 November. ABC News picked it up two days later, crediting that reporting, and quoted Oakland police saying the department is investigating "a grand theft that occurred in East Oakland" that the victim reported on 13 September 2026.

What $1.9 million a pallet implies

Divide $11.4 million by six and a single pallet carries about $1.9 million of goods. That figure is the spine of the story, because it does not describe a shrink-wrapped stack of gaming cards. Olaf Groth, a professor at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business, gave ABC7 a price of about $550,000 for a single chip; at that rate the whole shipment is roughly 21 units, three or four to a pallet. What was on them is undisclosed: TechPowerUp notes that Nvidia hardware spans AI accelerators, complete systems and GeForce cards, and nobody has said which. For scale, the two pallets of ZOTAC RTX 5090s that disappeared at São Paulo's Guarulhos airport in October were valued at about $470,000, roughly $235,000 a pallet, an eighth of this load.

Three dates and a gap nobody explains

The calendar deserves stating precisely. Pickup, 29 August. Police report, 13 September, per the OPD statement quoted by ABC. First publication, 4 November, followed by ABC7 on 5 November and ABC News on 6 November. That is more than seven weeks between the report and the first story, and none of the four accounts offers a reason for it. ABC7 reported that the truck made several multi-hour stops before investigators lost it in San Bernardino County, and that the theft was not noticed until early September.

What the file does not establish

No arrests have been announced. No outlet has named a GPU model, a shipper, a carrier or an insurer, no recovery has been reported, and the destination is unconfirmed. Groth told ABC that bigger cargoes and more complex heists point toward "a professionalization of the teams that are hijacking these", which is his reading of a pattern rather than a police finding. The pattern itself is documented: Fremont and Union City police investigated Nvidia cargo burglaries worth more than $7.5 million last year, and in September suspects who believed they were hitting Nvidia trucks found 40,000 pounds of sand instead.

Four documents would settle the important parts: a police statement naming the hardware and carrier, a filed criminal complaint, a recovery announcement, or an insurer's claim. Until one appears, the per-pallet arithmetic is the most solid thing in the file.