AINEWS
Cargo theft in North America is down 26% in volume but up to $304.6M in losses last quarter, because restricted AI servers fetch twice U.S. retail in China and still ship as ordinary dry freight.
A pursuit-intervention tactic — the same PIT maneuver police use to end car chases — spun a private security escort off a California highway earlier this summer. Once the escort was disabled, the semitruck kept driving. It never stopped. By the time anyone noticed, the cargo was gone and the truck was somewhere else.
That scene, reported by WIRED and corroborated by Tom's Hardware, is one of two recent incidents in which armed thieves used a PIT maneuver or a rear-end collision to disable a private guard vehicle escorting high-value electronics from Silicon Valley to Southern California. Neither truck has been recovered, and the combined cargo loss runs into the millions.
The two California incidents sit inside a much larger pattern. According to Verisk CargoNet, cargo theft losses across the U.S. and Canada more than doubled in Q2 2026, reaching $304.6 million — up from $135.7 million a year earlier. Incidents over the same window fell 26%, to 677. Theft volume is down, but the average reported-value theft now runs $564,009, because the goods being targeted are denser in dollar terms than they used to be.
The mechanism is export controls. Restricted Nvidia-grade servers, the kind bound for hyperscale data centers, can sell in China for roughly twice their U.S. retail price once sanctions and gray-market markups are applied. A truck that would once have carried low-margin consumer electronics now carries the kind of load that justifies violent interdiction. "Shipments worth several million dollars routinely move as conventional dry freight with no special security," said a Verisk CargoNet representative. "Lower incident volume should not be mistaken for lower risk."
The Verisk CargoNet representative's quote names the gap the industry has not closed. The freight world has not rebuilt its security model for a load of AI compute that can clear $5 million in a 53-foot trailer. The escorts, when they exist at all, are lightly armed civilians driving ordinary pickup trucks. There is no declared-value shipping protocol for compute. There is no dedicated lane for high-value electronics the way there is for pharmaceuticals or currency. There is, instead, a long-standing practice of booking freight under recently transferred motor-carrier numbers (MCNs) — the federal registration that lets a trucking company run a load — and in both California cases the MCN had recently changed hands. Investigators believe the drivers were complicit.
That is the lever the industry has not pulled. "It's the worst I've ever seen," said a freight-security specialist. A Southwest Transportation Security Council chairman, and a freight-security specialist. Others pointed to a fraud pipeline that runs from inside the trucking industry outward: legitimate companies sell or lend their MCN to criminal operations, the load is booked, the truck is hijacked, and the registration trails go cold.
Law enforcement is catching the back end. The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department Major Crimes Bureau and the Commercial Cargo Theft Apprehension Team seized roughly $4 million in stolen cargo in Vernon and arrested one suspect in a separate case. The California Highway Patrol's Border Division Cargo Theft Interdiction Program, running a 2026 enforcement tally through the AOL-syndicated wire, has recovered 55 stolen loads worth about $28 million this year, including a June 18 search in Anaheim that turned up pallets of Meta server switches worth about $2.2 million. Neither agency confirmed the two specific escort-ramming incidents WIRED described, which means the trend should be read from the data, not the anecdotes.
The two heists are evidence, not a thesis. The thesis is the gap between what a single load of restricted compute is now worth on the gray market and the way the freight industry still ships it: as ordinary dry freight, with the same MCN-booking practices and the same ad-hoc escorts. The export-control math is what made the trucks worth ramming. The security model is what left them rammable.