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Two trailers turned up at a truck yard outside Chicago in June, carrying $1.3 million between them. One held roughly $300,000 in copper wire, stolen from a site in Pine Hill, Alabama, and traced only because the trailer’s own GPS tracker kept broadcasting its location. The other, worth close to $1 million in data centre infrastructure equipment, had gone missing in Jacksonville, Florida, two weeks earlier. Both ended up at the same yard, delivered by the same driver.
It is a striking story on its own. It is also not an isolated one.
A bigger pattern than one truck yard
Verisk CargoNet, which tracks cargo theft across the US and Canada, recorded a 60% jump in estimated losses in 2025, to roughly $725 million, even though the total number of incidents barely moved. The reason is targeting, not volume: the average value stolen per incident rose 36% to just under $274,000, as organised groups moved away from opportunistic retail freight and toward copper, server components, storage drives and networking hardware – the physical inputs of the AI data centre build-out. CargoNet’s own outlook expects that shift to continue through 2026.
The Chicago case fits the pattern in a second way that matters more for security teams than the dollar figure does: the trailer carrying copper was riding on number plates that had themselves been reported stolen, in a different state, months earlier. This wasn’t someone breaking a padlock. It was a coordinated operation using false credentials to move freight through the system unchallenged.
The UK and Ireland aren't exempt
It is tempting to read this as an American problem tied to an American construction boom, but it isn’t. BauWatch’s 2025 Crime Report found that two-thirds of UK construction sites saw crime increase over the past year, with copper cabling and plant machinery the two most stolen categories and losses to UK construction now estimated in the hundreds of millions annually. Openreach has separately disclosed that copper theft from its own network has cost more than 100,000 customers their broadband or landline since April 2024, with over 150km of cable stripped out.
Every one of the drivers behind the US data centre theft wave (high scrap value, valuable freight sitting in transit or on unsecured laydown areas, and organised groups willing to plan around it) applies equally to a data centre, substation or hyperscale build going up in the UK, Ireland, and the rest of Europe. The materials are the same. The exposure is the same. The only thing that changes are which police force writes the report.
Why the perimeter fence isn't the answer
The instinct is to respond to a theft story with more fencing, more lighting, more cameras pointed at the boundary. Those are still necessary. But the Chicago case, and CargoNet’s wider analysis, point to a different weak point: identity and authorisation, not the fence line. CargoNet’s own 2026 outlook flags a rise in impersonation-based theft – criminal groups posing as legitimate hauliers or brokers to collect freight that is handed over willingly, because it looks like a normal delivery.
That is a physical access control problem as much as a logistics one. A laydown yard, goods-in point or site compound needs the same rigour as the data halls it is feeding: verified driver and vehicle credentials before a trailer is released or accepted, automatic number plate recognition cross-checked against watchlists rather than a visual glance at a cab door, and video systems that can flag a vehicle or trailer that doesn’t match what was expected. On a live construction programme moving high-value freight daily, “we have CCTV” isn’t the same as “we know who is authorised to be here and to take what.”
What this means for build teams
Data centre and critical infrastructure projects already take physical security seriously once the servers are racked and the site is live. What this year’s cargo theft numbers make clear is that the exposure starts earlier at the point materials leave a supplier, and every stop they make before they reach the gate. For anyone specifying security for a live build, that means treating the compound, the loading bay and the delivery route as part of the security perimeter, not an afterthought to it.
As an enterprise systems integrator working across critical infrastructure and complex construction programmes, that is the conversation we would rather have before a shipment goes missing than after.
Evolution designs and integrates security for data centres from the compound gate through to cage and rack level access control.
Click here to find out how we secure data centre sites, end to end.
Sources: Cook County Sheriff’s Office (via FreightWaves); Business Insider; Verisk CargoNet 2025 Annual and 2026 Q1/H1 Supply Chain Crime Analyses; BauWatch Crime Report 2025; Openreach, via Data Center Dynamics.