SANTA CLARA, July 8 — Jensen Huang has spent more than three decades building NVIDIA into the engine room of the artificial intelligence revolution, but lately, the company’s most powerful products have been vanishing from construction sites. The co-founder and CEO of NVIDIA has watched his company’s H100 graphics processing units — the gold-standard chips for training large AI models — become a target for thieves. Each H100 carries a price tag of around $30,000.
In Chandler, Arizona, in 2024, a heist netted thieves $3 million worth of NVIDIA hardware from a data center construction site. NVIDIA has responded by embedding tracking technology directly into its GPUs.
Huang has stressed the importance of securing the AI supply chain, recognizing that the demand driving NVIDIA’s success has created a vulnerability. Huang co-founded NVIDIA in 1993 and has served as its CEO since then, steering the company from its origins as a graphics card maker to the dominant supplier of hardware for the AI industry. Under his leadership, NVIDIA’s market capitalization surpassed $2 trillion in 2024.
The thefts of NVIDIA hardware are a signal of the demand for AI chips and the vulnerabilities in infrastructure. Data center construction sites have emerged as targets.
The Chandler theft was not an isolated incident.
Supply chain security becomes a boardroom priority
For Huang, the challenge is twofold. On one hand, NVIDIA is racing to meet demand from cloud providers, startups, and governments building out AI infrastructure. On the other, the company must ensure that the hardware it ships reaches its intended destination.
The tracking technology NVIDIA has deployed is one piece of that puzzle. Huang has emphasized the importance of securing the AI supply chain, and NVIDIA has implemented tracking technology in its GPUs.
What to watch next
The AI chip market shows no signs of cooling. The H100 remains the most sought-after piece of silicon in the world, and Jensen Huang’s biggest problem is not just building enough of them — it’s making sure they don’t disappear before they ever get plugged in.
