If 20 years ago a cyberpunk author pitched a story to me about thieves that steal a truckload full of AI-grade processors in order to profit off a digital gold rush I'd say "cool story bro but it doesn't make sense technically"
Organized entities don’t take a truck unless they have a guaranteed outcome in mind.
Make no mistake; they have the capability to ensure that those cards are paperweights. Just look at the nouveau project and how post-Maxwell cards are effectively locked into proprietary drivers via cryptograpgic signature verification of the firmware blob gating access to the power management and reclocking API's.
Organized crime in the US figured out a long time ago that hurting a driver generally leads to the collapse of the whole operation and indictments. Ask any trucker how often they’re approached.
PS2 is released. He goes to the Bestbuy warehouse to pickup a skid of 20 PS2's to deliver to a Bestbuy. They seal the trailer BUT the supervisor at the warehouse was busy so he hands the seal to my friend to put on the trailer. My friend slips it on and makes it look like he snapped it together but didn't. Warehouse guy sees the "sealed" trailer and signs the paperwork. 8 of those 20 PS2's didn't make it to Bestbuy. He unloaded them with the help of his wife and then simply snapped the seal on. The store manager accused him of the theft since it was a local point to point delivery and inspected the trailer for holes or signs of theft but found nothing. He shrugged and said well your guy signed for this count and sealed the trailer so not my problem.
He also told me the owner of the trucking company used the warehouse as his own personal shopping mall. Turns out the whole trucking company, drivers, warehouse workers, management, owner, all of em, were stealing. And yes, they eventually got caught. But it happens all the time.
Was the Fourth movie, in 2009. First one was The Fast and The Furious. Definite articles and no ampersand.
Yeah exactly, I would expect like spaceship load or sth...
"More than 400 Silicon Valley businesses had been robbed by chip thieves in the last 18 months. The businesses range from giants like Sun Microsystems to small companies of 100 employees. The apparent record for a heist was $9.9 million worth of computer parts stolen from Centon Electronics in Irvine, Calif., in May."
I think deficit MCUs are now joining this list. China similarly sees mass break-ins into warehouses of component distributor companies now. Some MCUs fetched up to $100 bucks from their original <$1 price at the peak of the shortage.
Data center where techs don't ask questions?
Fraud by someone who did the TCO math on a Linux PC farm?
Does an E10k have unusually high gold content, by pound of gear?
(Scott McNealy thinking outside the box to boost sales numbers?)
My colleague's theory was they were likely going to the oil and gas exploration modelling or nuclear research for middle-eastern states that couldn't get state-of-the-art gear.
The E10k was a $1m server. Steal 3 racks of those, sell them to a var for $500k, party.
Nefarious? Like running Oracle?