alt Hacker NewsThese guys have unlimited money, why are they still transporting with regular couriers? There are tons of end-to-end secure logistics companies out there that can do the job. I can't imagine their insurance is too happy about it either.
It's been an ongoing well-coordinated effort, with gear often ending up in China. Hello, where is the FBI?
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/big-tech/data-cen...
It's going to make a hell of a good movie one day though.
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> These guys have unlimited money, why are they still transporting with regular couriers?
Because decisions about how to handle individual units are made based on unit economics. And if you have unlimited money $10 million in lost goods is a rounding error that doesn't require any action.
11M worth of chips is very small stakes for all involved[1]. It is just about two NVL72 racks worth.
Every logistics operations expects a certain percentage of theft, they insure for it. The cost of securing has to be less than cost of loss. The logistics departments are doing 10's of billions of dollars every month to every hyperscaler and all the neoclouds all over the country (and internationally).
Even military logistics routinely losses high value items - from the recent f-35 part they tried to ship via HK(and lost to China) to even full nuclear bombs that are lost to this day from the cold war era.
If we cannot secure nuclear bombs 100% during transit, there isn't going to be 100% success for computer chips.
[1]Even for foreign adversaries, probably not worth the risk of the scandal just to get two racks. They need orders of magnitude more - the South East Asian route in the news this week seems to be $5-10B worth of chips for context.
I don't have an answer just anecdotally I know we'd use UPS (not even usps) to ship classified documents when I worked at the DOE
If you have unlimited money, it also means that $11.4M is nothing to you.
1. This was 6 pallets, not really a large shipment.
2. Was it an issue with the courier? The article makes it sound like it was picked up by a truck that wasn't supposed to
It's a question of how often it fails and how much it costs to fix it. If they can save $1 on average by doing it the dumb way, then that's what they'll do.
1/ their insurance doesn't give a fuck
2/ why would the FBI get involved in local police matters?
> These guys have unlimited money, why are they still transporting with regular couriers?
Commercial shipments don’t work like when you receive a package from Amazon. The terms of the freight, including the point at which ownership is handed off, are negotiated terms. An $11.4 million contract would have this negotiated and agreed upon. Depending on how it’s structured, the shipment may not have been the shipper’s responsibility at all after it left the warehouse.
> I can't imagine their insurance is too happy about it either.
Insurance would take the risk of the transport method into account. The policy would say what transport methods are covered and the allowed methods would be used to calculate the risk of loss.