Authorities recover $1.3 million worth of data center supplies and equipment in a truck stop near Chicago. Equipment like this is a prime target for theft rings given its high value, but it's also likely difficult to sell given its specialized nature.
  • FalcoLombardi1@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    10 hours ago

    Looks like most people in here both, didn’t actually read that everything was recovered, and also don’t understand freight theft.

  • Echo Dot@feddit.ukEnglish
    61·
    12 hours ago

    What a weird crime.

    This is like stealing hospital equipment, sure it’s high value, but who are you going to sell it to that isn’t going to ask questions?

    I can see corporate espionage making sense, one AI company stealing chips from another AI company but it doesn’t seem like these guys had a buyer.

    • CADmonkey@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      6 hours ago

      Maybe they are stealing them to delay/sabotage a data center. And increase freight insurance rates.

      • Echo Dot@feddit.ukEnglish
        1·
        8 hours ago

        Yeah but even then, these are high-end server chips that require rack power supplies and industrial cooling. At most you’d want like two of them and even then you’d have to have a pretty beefy electrical connection, any more than that and the cops are going to be raiding your place thinking you’re growing weed.

    • mlg@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      11 hours ago

      There’s a black market for export to China but they’d need to already have contacts or involvement for that to work.

      Although ot would be way funnier to see unobtainium enterprise gear end up on ebay lol.

      • SpaceCowboy@lemmy.caEnglish
        2·
        6 hours ago

        Stuff stolen in Alabama and Florida later found in Chicago… that’s organized crime, so seems probable they’d have the contacts needed to fence the goods internationally.

        But they probably could sell RAM and SSDs at a discount on eBay right now.

  • Zink@programming.devEnglish
    251·
    18 hours ago

    You love to see it.

    Unfortunately, with the state of this country I could also see aggressive militarized private security getting more popular around this shit.

    • Echo Dot@feddit.ukEnglish
      3·
      11 hours ago

      Given that only another AI company could possibly be interested in AI chips perhaps we could spark some sort of war between two rival groups. Could be fun.

      • Zink@programming.devEnglish
        2·
        7 hours ago

        Oh boy, just what we need, corpo-wars to go along with the nation-wars.

        It would be nice to see them hurting each other instead of the general populace, but we all know that they do collateral damage to innocents even when weapons aren’t involved.

      • thousandyardstare@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        5·
        12 hours ago

        Mike Pondsmith’s Cyberpunk series actually started in 1988 with the first version of the TRRPG set in 2013. Arasaka was around then. Armatech-Luccessi International, which became Militech after rebranding, was a corpo in 2013, just in a different capacity at the time.

        In 1990’s Cyberpunk 2020, set in 2020, both corpos had been fully established as very powerful, separate entities.

        So, Mike’s seen this coming for a while. There are so many parallels from our current timeline and the fictional one in the game, it’s scary…

        • BeMoreCareful@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          10 hours ago

          Honestly, there is a big turn in sci Fi when we moved towards neoliberalism.

          It’s almost like in the 70s and 80s a lot of it became dystopian or fantasy.

          Avarice as a prime motive does not make happy stories.

  • elucubra@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    4·
    13 hours ago

    However, they are also specialized machines that are often only bought by institutions and large companies, so thieves would likely have a hard time selling them on the black market.

    I’m sure Russian, North Korean and buyers from some other countries would care about that.