The era of artificial intelligence could be a boon for entrepreneurs—not for using AI to build a business noecessarily, but because enterprising thieves can jack some equipment from the build site and flip it for a quick buck.
That was the plan of some thieves in Illinois who, unfortunately for them, got caught with more than $300,000 worth of copper wire spools swiped from a data center facility hundreds of miles away, according to a report from Business Insider, amongst other stolen equipment.
Investigators at the Cook County Sheriff’s Office recovered two trailers last week that housed about $1.3 million worth of data center supplies, including more than $300,000 worth of copper wire spools. The trailers were picked up in a Chicago-area truck yard after the cops received a tip about stolen copper. Once they found that trailer, they questioned the truck yard owner and learned that the same person who had dropped off that trailer had brought another one in the week prior. Come to find out, that one had some stolen data center materials in it, too.
The material had apparently been reported stolen from Pine Hill, Alabama, where there is seemingly a lot of targets to choose from for enterprising thieves, given the state’s rapid expansion of data center projects—including a recent promise of $1.5 billion in investment coming from Google to expand its data center campus in the state.
The thieves in this particular scheme appear to remain at large, as no arrests have been announced, but they seem to have been well-traveled. In addition to the materials from Alabama, Business Insider reports that the second trailer tied to this data center hijack came from Jacksonville, Florida. So it seems they’ve been zig-zagging across the country with the goods, but were caught before they were able to cash in off their score.
Cargo theft has become big business in the United States, with the Department of Homeland Security claiming that it generates as much as $35 billion in losses every year. The National Insurance Crime Bureau recently reported that cargo theft losses increased by 27% in 2024 and estimated they would rise by about 22% in 2025.
Data centers are a pretty logical target for these types of thefts, too, and this Illinois case is certainly far from the only instance of a server farm getting hit. A recent report from The Canadian Press highlighted a case in which a dozen loads of copper and electronics got jacked in transit, costing the shipping company about $5 million. That’s one way to stop data centers from getting built.
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