About 23(?) years ago, just after the 2(3?) chip factories in Taiwan burned down, there were Vietnamese and Chinese gangs in San Jose / Milpitas robbing stores/warehouses of ram and pentium chips, which were in very high demand.
"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?