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NBC Investigation Reports More Than $100 Million in Data Center Cargo Stolen Since June, Including Escort Rammings

Posted:

October 28, 2026

Thieves have stolen more than $100 million in equipment bound for data centers from U.S. highways since June, according to an NBC News investigation published Oct. 26, 2026. NBC attributed the total to trade executives, advisers and investigators who assist police on major cargo cases. In one incident described in the reporting, a trailer carrying about $13 million in server equipment toward Fayetteville, Georgia, in early June disappeared after another vehicle struck its unmarked police escort; the trailer was later found with the pallets gone. In a second case, a shipment bound for Texas lost about $10 million in server rack components after its escort vehicle was struck and the load’s GPS tracking was apparently manipulated.

Gerardo Pachuca, a private cargo theft investigator, told NBC News the escort collision “was not an accident.” Coverage of the investigation describes thieves phishing freight broker accounts, posting fictitious loads or bidding on legitimate ones through compromised accounts, and using false identities to collect freight before transferring it to other vehicles. Keith Lewis of Verisk CargoNet compared the targeted hardware to gold bars. Where individual stolen shipments ended up has not been publicly established.

The report follows an Overhaul analysis released Oct. 21 estimating that more than $150 million in AI equipment has been stolen in 2026 and that deception was used in 92% of thefts of high-value technology shipments. Taken together, the findings indicate that criminals targeting data center freight are pairing digital fraud before pickup with physical interference in transit, extending the risk across the brokers, carriers, shippers and security providers involved in moving high-value technology loads.