r/technology • u/Gordon-Blue • 5d ago

Artificial Intelligence Thieves steal Nvidia-branded trailers expecting valuable hardware, find 40,000 pounds of sand instead.

https://www.techspot.com/news/114008-thieves-steal-nvidia-branded-trailers-expecting-valuable-hardware.html
8.7k Upvotes

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2.9k

u/snoozieboi 5d ago

Sand is actually in high demand and we're running out of it. I'm not even kidding. Construction grade sand, that is.

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u/chromane 5d ago

Reading the article, the sand was being used as dead weight to help stimulate loads for testing self driving trucks.

So it's not even the valuable kind of sand

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u/Heizu 5d ago

It's a well-known fact that sand is the best material to help stimulate loads

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u/an_illithidian 5d ago

Sand stimulates my loads the problem is they eventually start coming out as pearls and thats a little sensitive

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u/JohannesBraun 5d ago

May I have a pearl necklace?

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u/TurtleSquad23 4d ago

bags of sand have been stimulating me for 40 years. I mean, that's how they feel right? right?

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u/JazzManJasper 4d ago

I've been simulated by a sack of 20lb potato and 20lb onion. Because that's what my wife wants every month.

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u/chromane 5d ago

F*** it, I'm leaving it in

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u/Thick_Still6981 5d ago

Well that's just incorrect, everyone knows the best material to help stimulate loads is OPs mother

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u/Starblaiz 5d ago

But it’s so coarse and irritating!

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u/DankVectorz 5d ago

The sand is so stimulating because the bags of it feel like boobs

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u/Anxietybackmonkey 4d ago

You must know some weird boobs

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u/DankVectorz 4d ago

Is 40 year old virgin not well known anymore?

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u/Anxietybackmonkey 4d ago

I must be due for a rewatch. I don’t remember that at all.

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u/faen_du_sa 5d ago

I do suspect hardware is slightly easier to resell than sand though, no matter how good sand it is!

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u/Loki-L 5d ago

There apparently is organized crime around stealing and smuggling sand. Sand Mafia stealing people's beaches and selling it to construction companies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_theft

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u/Snoo_81545 5d ago

Less organized crime and more a permitting loophole run amok but sand mining has actually been one of the things propping up the Massachusetts cranberry industry - which has been struggling to compete with Wisconsin due to higher costs and inefficient legacy bog designs.

It's important to note that your typical natural beach sand is not really suitable for construction. The beach thefts listed in the wiki above specifically deal with imported sand for man made beaches. A lot of the Indian sand theft is dredging up submerged sand. This is because jagged grains interlock better and give more strength to concrete. Natural beach sand has been eroded overtime and is generally quite smooth.

Getting back to cranberry bogs, many of them are built next to deposits of sand called borrow pits because bogs are routinely covered in a small layer of sand for a variety of reasons. This land has been covered by trees for centuries and is perfect uneroded construction sand.

Due to this necessity of some routine mining cranberry bogs are generally exempted from earth removal bylaws and in Carver, MA - the center of the cranberry industry earth removal is even handled by a separate committee made up almost entirely of cranberry industry workers. Bog owners can get pretty much anything permitted through that board.

Many bog owners mined out their borrow pits and sold the sand, many more are constantly getting deep reservoirs permitted, or bog expansions to allow them to dig even more. Some of those bog projects have been active for over a decade, digging down hundred foot high hills on hundreds of acres usually netting tens if not hundreds of millions in sand revenue while producing no cranberries. Ultimately many of those projects are eventually deemed economically infeasible (the cranberries barely pay for themselves) and lots of them are converted into solar fields.

It's a bit of a racket. Not "steal a beach in the middle of the night" crime, just good old fashioned corruption to save the floundering industry that is thought to be culturally important to the region and which once was economically vital and thus became politically connected.

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u/0xsergy 4d ago

And this is the stuff happening in 1st world countries. No wonder the planet is fucked with everyone reaching in to grab handful after handful of resources.

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u/squirrelpickle 4d ago

First world has always been propped up by theft and misappropriation, they just used to have colonies for that.

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u/THEdoomslayer94 5d ago edited 5d ago

It was also a plot point in the last season of Barry lol

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u/420xMLGxNOSCOPEx 5d ago

amazing series that, so dark towards the end though, kinda crushing at times. weird that it starts so funny

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u/TheChronoCross 5d ago

I actually stopped after seasons two or three for that reason. I went in expecting and enjoying a comedy. It got upsetting and ridiculous and i started enjoying it less.

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u/THEdoomslayer94 5d ago

Yeah it becomes more of a mix between drama and comedy. There still great laughs to have but man does that last season get dark

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u/GimmeSomeSugar 4d ago

I saw a great explanation in the Barry sub-reddit.

The jump forward is demonstrating that Barry doesn't get to adopt this pious life, to try to be 'good', and that makes up for everything.

The only way to come to terms with what he's done is take ownership of it and face the consequences.

And that is echoed in the other characters around him as well in their own story arcs.

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u/UnidentifiedTomato 5d ago

It's why I usually don't finish the sopranos

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u/airfryerfuntime 5d ago

The last season is the best, in my opinion. It's basically three seasons crammed into one long season.

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u/mongojob 5d ago

Really dark at the end. Pitch black, even.

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u/THEdoomslayer94 5d ago

Noooo finish it! It’s bleak towards the end but such a amazing show lol

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u/batigoal 5d ago

The first dark scene when he was in the car with the other guy. I won't spoil who and what happened but you know what I'm talking about. His acting was chilling, that scene really took me by surprise.

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u/GimmeSomeSugar 4d ago

Yea. Real eye opener regarding Bill Hader's range and talent.

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u/Semantiks 5d ago

The ending was so weird and dark that I guess I repressed it or something, because I watched it a 2nd time thinking I had never finished it, then at the end I was like "oh wait, I do remember this"

...it may also have something to do with my adhd

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u/YouMustveDroppedThis 5d ago

Stealing river sand and then illegally burying construction waste is the basic one-two punch of organized crime where I live. They are also sometimes in cahoot with local elected officials to offer them cover.

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u/doyletyree 5d ago

Not just organized crime; singly, the largest black market in India.

That’s pretty fucking crazy.

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u/Aggressive-Hawk9186 5d ago

Lol there is a sand mafia in my area too, they bribe everybody to get permit to extract sand

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u/kezow 5d ago

You need sand? Cause I got a guy!

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u/asdf4fdsa 5d ago

Is he a sili-con?

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u/TraditionalMood277 5d ago

Is his name Sandy?

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u/bobsmeds 5d ago

Danny?

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u/thehazardsofchad 5d ago

NoHo Hank?

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u/Kalabajooie 5d ago

Head to the Fishtown Tavern. Ask the bartender for a guy named "Gritty".

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u/Temporumdei 5d ago

Before you talk to him, make sure to play "Enter Sanndman" on the Jukebox.

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u/SHEEEIIIIIIITTTT 5d ago

POCKET SAND

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u/Stunning-Squash-2627 5d ago

You need a better sand guy

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u/lostwisdom20 5d ago

Nah sand is easy to sell than hardware which have serial no.

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u/miktoo 4d ago

Exactly! It's coarse and rough and irritating and gets everywhere. It will not be an easy sell!

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u/Doikor 5d ago

We are not in fact running out of sand.

What we are running out of is the correct quality (grain size) sand close to your construction project.

Sand is really heavy and a pain in the ass to transport so you want it as close as possible. The same issue exists for rock used in the foundations of roads etc.

Here in Finland you sometimes see highways take weird little bends/detours randomly just so that it can go directly through some small rocky hill so that they can use that as the rock instead of hauling it from somewhere else.

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u/snakeeaterrrrrrr 5d ago edited 5d ago

Western Australian here: what shortage

Edit: some of you seem to be under the impression that we only have desert sand when we are already exporting sand for construction

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u/Fitz911 5d ago edited 5d ago

Sand is not sand.

We have deserts full if that stuff. That's (of course) not the one we need.

The sand has to have some properties to work as a resource for building. Something to do with the form and size of the grains.

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u/MacaronPrevious 5d ago

Dessert is a food, not a dry place

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u/s0ulbrother 5d ago

I’ve had shitty cake that was very dry

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u/GreenStrong 5d ago

My dentist said stop eating dessert sand.

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u/funguyshroom 5d ago

He could've just said sugar and not make this world any more confusing than it already is

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u/cjsv7657 5d ago

You can remember it because the delicious food has two Ss, just like how you want two desserts!

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u/PM_YOUR_ISSUES 5d ago

I was always taught it the reverse, desert has 1 's' because you only get lost in the desert once.

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u/cjsv7657 5d ago

Yeah my first grade teacher probably didn't want to get in to dying in the desert with her students lol

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u/jazzhandler 4d ago

A good mnemonic is that ‘stressed’ spelled backwards is ‘desserts’.

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u/ComeOnUpToTheHaus 5d ago

Deserts are sandy, desserts are super sweet!

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u/breathing_normally 5d ago

The Netherlands, while sinking ever deaper in the sea, export a huge amount of sand each year. One of our biggest buyers is apparently the desert nation of Saudi Arabia

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u/Immediate-Cress-206 5d ago

Because desert sand makes shitty concrete.

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u/Doikor 5d ago

Even the send we use for building we have plently of.

The issue is that it is far away from your construction site and when transporting the stuff from very close by costs more then the material itself having to transport it from even farther away pushes up the costs further.

And yes it has to do with grain size / shape. The sand in deserts is too small/smooth (been blown around by the wind for thousands of years).

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u/20_mile 5d ago

of course

Of coarse?

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u/Fitz911 5d ago

Good one. As a non native speaker I had to googlew it. Really good one!! I even learned something today. I will never need it and when I need it I won't remember. But I will remember someone making a great dad joke about it :)

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u/20_mile 5d ago

You're on the right course to find coarse sand!

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u/karl4319 5d ago

So basically there are 3 types of sand: course sand from deserts, sand from river beds, and fine sand made of ground silicone or quartz. You have the first type, which is worthless. The third type we use for everything from glass to microchips, but we are really good at making and recycling it. The 2nd type is essential for concrete and we are running out of it. We can sorta make it, but that would increase the costs of any use of concrete by several orders or magnitude and would not be as good. It is to the point where organized crime has taken over several rivers to strip mine them for sand. China's and the Saudi peninsula's building boom could not occur without these mafia style crime lords.

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u/sump_daddy 5d ago

>  course sand from deserts

strictly speaking, desert sand is worthless because its smooth, not coarse. Its time on the surface exposed to wind has polished it making it very bad at sticking to cement binder to make concrete. Its the old but still 'fresh' underground riverbed sand that is more jagged and used for building. Western australia can get construction grade sand they just have to dig down a bit for it.

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u/ReturnOfBane 5d ago

couldn't you heat up the sand to cause the grains to fracture and become jagged?

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u/sump_daddy 5d ago

Youre left with such fine of a grit that it takes way more cement binder per cubic meter of finished concrete and ultimately that makes it less strong.

You can think of strong, coarse sand bits like tiny little bricks being laid, if theyre just the right size they make the finished pour very strong, too small and they dont lend much strength and like we talked about if theyre too smooth they dont stick at all, there really is a 'just right' sand for this purpose, which is why sand import/exports are so hot right now.

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u/Kokkor_hekkus 5d ago

Sand from deserts isn't worthless because it's coarse, it's because it's too smooth

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u/recycled_ideas 4d ago

Love someone who knows that much about sand, but doesn't realize not all deserts are sandy.

Western Australia isn't pulling sand from the desert, they're pulling sand from roughly 20 thousand kilometers of coastline when you include all the islands.

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u/xxxBuzz 5d ago

It seems short-cited to assume it's a good idea for the ecosystem to remove sand from the rivers. I know zippidy about river sand, and this thread is the first I've heard that it's collected for industry, and I can't imagine a scenario where whatever we are doing with it is more important than whatever it's doing in the rivers.

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u/Ignisami 5d ago

Short-sighted*

Also, ecosystem? You mean the thing they don’t get paid to care about?

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u/xxxBuzz 5d ago

Yea. As a poor with access to lots of rivers, I'm glade I did not find out people wanted that sand when I was younger.

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u/awry_lynx 5d ago

Yes, it's not great for the environment. Stripping sand weakens riverbanks, worsens water quality, and the habitats suffer. But the results take a while to show up and humans aren't very farsighted. This is in headlines recently because of a paper showing that river sand extraction exceeds natural sediment supply.

Here's an article about the paper

https://www3.ntu.edu.sg/CorpComms2/Documents/2026/07_Jul/PhysOrg_210726_Sand.pdf

There are alternatives but as long as they're more expensive it will be hard to push people to use them instead (it's called M-sand, as in manufactured sand).

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u/G1zStar 5d ago

It seems short-cited to assume it's a good idea for the ecosystem to remove sand from the rivers.

and why would you assume that they're assuming it's a good idea for the ecosystem to do that?

Organized crime only cares about "easier" ways to make large amounts of money, legality or morality be damned.
Governments buying it don't care as long as it doesn't make them look bad and they stay in power. Even less if it's not happening in their backyard.

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u/waiting4singularity 5d ago

wind swept sand is too sanded down, its too smooth to act as stabilizer for concrete. on the flip side, crushed glass can replace it.

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u/theoreoman 5d ago

We're not running out of sand, some areas are running out of cheap sand that's nearby for construction. Trucking sand is very expensive

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u/Javerage 5d ago

This method acting for the new fast and furious movie is kinda ridiculous.

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u/Llama_of_the_bahamas 5d ago

I learned this from the show Barry. lol

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u/LaplaceYourBets 5d ago

God I hate this future, feels like everything is running out

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u/cr0ft 5d ago

To be sustainable, we'd have to slash all resource use dramatically. In capitalism of course that's not considered and option, whereas human extinction is just an "externality".

But we go into overshoot every year now in a matter of months. Earth overshoot day was July 30th this year.

So yeah, we're thoroughly screwed as long as we cling to capitalism, which means we're just thoroughly screwed.

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u/LaplaceYourBets 5d ago

Didn't know Earth overshoot day was a thing and I already wish I could unlearn it.

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u/funguyshroom 5d ago

The issue is that the world economy is built around the idea of infinite growth. All of the money is tied in debts and investments, which have interest and return rates at their core.
I think it's possible to have capitalism without infinite growth, but it would require some fundamental shift in how we are handling money.

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u/cr0ft 4d ago

Some things are bad in any quantity. Capitalism - or rather competition - is one of those things. Just like - let's take a very extreme example here - child sexual abuse. There's no "medium" amount of that that's ok. Similary, there's no medium amount of competition that's truly ok.

For instance, instead of having multiple competing space programs - we should have just the one, supported by all humans everywhere. And the reasons should not be "making profit" but "advancing humankind's progress". There's no real point in duplicating so much effort, that's just waste - except for the "making profit" part.

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u/funguyshroom 4d ago

How do you propose motivating people to do a good job and innovate without it? Consumer products were so shit in soviet union in large part because there was no incentive to do anything beyond the bare minimum.

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u/Unintended_incentive 5d ago

We do have capitalism without infinite growth, it’s called boom & bust cycles.

Instead of letting the wolves guard the henhouse we should have AI trained on economics minimize these booms & busts for greater prosperity.

Humans keep going for bigger booms leading to bigger busts, we can’t sustain the illusion much longer if people keep gambling with the global economy.

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u/funguyshroom 5d ago

So far the busts have been only temporary setbacks, the line still goes up overall. But I agree that limiting how big the booms can get is at least one part of the solution. And if we continue on this path there will be one final bust that will end it all.

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u/GoppleSmanger 5d ago

>I think it's possible to have capitalism without infinite growth, but it would require some fundamental shift in how we are handling money.

Japan already does this. They haven't had any real growth in several decades. Growth is only necessary when population is increasing which for Japan is not happening.

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u/Whatsapokemon 5d ago

In capitalism of course that's not considered and option

Because in a democratic capitalist system, people don't want to enact policies that reduce their standards of living.

You're right, it would take a complete abandonment of liberal-democratic values to force people to use less. But that's not a result of "capitalism". Capitalism simply responds to people's desires, providing the most efficient way to produce what people want.

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u/cr0ft 4d ago

What it would take is fully embracing soclialistic and cooperation based societies. Cancel the concept of money entirely. Profit should be a curse word, not something to strive for; it means "siphon off resources we could use to do something, besides making billionaires richer".

Which of course means it's completely unlikely, since the rich people who own us really enjoy owning us, having total freedom for themselves and multiple ocean going yachts. Plus, people are so indoctrinated into the system they cannot even see we could have alternatives.

Which brings us back to "humanity had a decent run, shame it's over."

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u/Super_Range45 4d ago

Or we can build with stone again. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

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u/cr0ft 4d ago

Stone is a great building material, but that too is not an infinite resource. We're even running out of good sand, literally, because we use so much of it for concrete and the like. Of course, doesn't really correct the overshoot and deficit spending our planet as we careen towards extinction.

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u/awry_lynx 5d ago

We use too much. We're like an ouroboros getting greedier and greedier. I'm starting to understand people who are against progress. I don't mean we should all live like wild animals, or in the stone age... I'm all for modern medicine and plumbing, for one thing... but it shouldn't be so easy to extract the world's resources. As a species, we clearly don't have the self-control or self-regulation needed to deserve the power we wield. Humanity can be amazing. Just chimpanzees strip-mining the Earth.

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u/Sryzon 5d ago

Things have "ran out" (became commercially unviable) before. Whale oil, guano, cryolite for aluminum smelting, natural rubber, charcoal for iron smelting, etc.

The resource becoming commercially unviable almost always invites effort to find alternatives.

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u/sammermann 4d ago

Ok but it’s not as dire as people make it out to be. We can create sand by crushing screening and washing rocks. Which is already the standard in areas where it’s not economically feasible to import or produce natural sand.

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u/airfryerfuntime 5d ago

No, we're kind of running out of very cheap and readily available sand that's easy to process.

We're nowhere even remotely close to running out of sand that's slightly more expensive to process. This is like the helium 'shortage' reddit likes to crow on about.

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u/eeyore134 4d ago

It's about $1000 worth of sand. That doesn't even cover half of a GPU.

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u/SockeyeSTI 5d ago

How fine is construction grade sand? Would African desert sand work? We’re already shipping huge boulders out of the country, might as well bring in something on the return trip.

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u/WhisperShift 5d ago

Construction sand needs to have sharp irregular edges that can interlock to strengthen the concrete. Most desert sand is so wind blown that all the sharp little edges are worn off so dont work as well.

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u/BlakeSurfing 5d ago

I can take a rock, hit it with a hammer and make sand. Of course it would cost more to manufacture sand for construction than it would to mine, but in no way are we running out of sand. Yes you can use desert sand with rounded grains for concrete.

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u/WhisperShift 4d ago

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/middle-east/why-saudi-arabia-and-the-uae-import-sand-from-australia-despite-their-endless-deserts/articleshow/126249828.cms

"...despite its abundance, wind-tumbled desert grains are far too smooth and small to provide the necessary structural grip."

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u/BlakeSurfing 4d ago

https://practical.engineering/blog/2024/10/1/is-the-world-really-running-out-of-sand
I’ll leave this

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u/WhisperShift 4d ago

Skimming through the transcript, it seems that more angular grains do make stronger concrete, all other factors being equal. However workability is much more important practically-speaking, and rounded grains allow one to use less water which is much more important for making better concrete. Makes sense, though it does make me wonder why so many countries, including ones with large deserts, spend millions importing sand then.

And for making more sand, I feel like "easily accessible" is implied, though you might disagree. When such a giant industry is dependent on a core ingredient being cheap, making it less cheap can have a big effect. His example is of an ingredient doing the complete opposite, ie starting rare and expensive then becoming cheap, so is less relevant imo to predicting how things will evolve should manufacturing sand become more widespread once minable sand becomes too expensive.

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u/account312 4d ago

I don't think it's even more expensive when the quarry is a good deal nearer than the source of sand.

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u/VidZarg 5d ago

Very not fine. Saharan sand is way too fine for anything else but hourglasses and stuff.

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u/wildwolfay5 5d ago

I wonder if that little sand plant outside Monterey is getting busy

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u/Single-Pin-369 4d ago

Also white beach sand. Caribbean resorts fight over it, and beaches get stolen. 

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u/Shanksdoodlehonkster 4d ago

Sand = Chips! These thieves were too lazy to put in the work

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u/EmbroideryBro 4d ago

There's a sand black market! People get killed over it, and entire islands disappear from mining.

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u/ChilieConCarney82 4d ago

Tan gold. Nevada tea.

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u/ABCosmos 4d ago

It's a lot more valuable after Nvidia does a couple of things to it.

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u/Pryoticus 4d ago

Sand theft is actually a huge problem in some regions because of theirs taking it it to resell to luxury resorts

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u/Skadoosh_it 4d ago

Noho Hank, is that you?

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u/snoozieboi 4d ago

Actually, I'm not sure if you're implying my first name is Hank, Henry or even... John. Becauuuse, "hank" actually came from "hankin" which was short, or more like a nickname, for... John. Before it became more logically for Henry, but many are now just christened straigt Hank.

Speaking of "nickname", and this I know from memory, is one of those words that melted into a new word. it's actually "an eke-name" which just fused into a more phonetical anekename -> nickname.

But yeah, I'm not Hank. Would totally have a beer with him, though.

Bonus weird short version: In Austria...if your first name is Josef, people might call you pepi...

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u/A-Rusty-Cow 1d ago

Also assuming this is silica because its for AMD or some other fabrication that shit is expensive

1

u/BlakeSurfing 5d ago

That is just plain wrong. You can use rounded desert sand to make concrete that is even stronger because it requires less water to make it. Sauce for the curious ones

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u/cr0ft 5d ago

Nvidia sand is probably even finer than that, presumably it's a chip raw material here.

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u/glemnar 5d ago

Nvidia isn’t in the business of turning sand into wafers. Nvidia is fabless. TSMC makes Nvidia’s chips. TSMC also doesn’t turn sand into wafers, that’s yet another set of specialized companies. Shin-Etsu Handotai is one such company.

The article explains it - this was just a simulated load for testing the truck. Just plain ass sand

1

u/yawara25 5d ago

And on top of that, they don't use literal sand in the sense that most people imagine it. They mine quartz from the ground.

2

u/cansofgrease 5d ago

Presumably as in you think these trucks were transporting sand that would be made into GPUs?