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."
CPUs, and unsoldered GPUs are the most smuggled item into China, bigger than gold, cash, booze, and other valuables.
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.
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.
I remember something similar happening at "AboveSecure", Abovenet's silly "super secure" vaulted datacenter in that downtown San Jose building that used to be the massive sports bar. The thing there was storage though, like 2 or 3 racks of EMC jbods. A datacenter tech thought they were legit and helped them get the kit on the truck.
