Organized cargo theft is following the money into the data center buildout, and the equipment is most exposed long before it reaches the building.

Investigators in Illinois recovered two stolen trailers holding roughly $1.3 million in data center supplies at a truck yard near Chicago, FreightWaves reported. The Cook County Sheriff’s Office was tipped off to a trailer at a yard in Elk Grove Township carrying about $300,000 in copper wire spools, reported stolen in Pine Hill, Alabama. The yard’s owner then told investigators the same driver had dropped off a second trailer a week earlier. That one held about $1 million in data center infrastructure equipment and had been reported stolen in Jacksonville, Florida on June 10. No arrests had been announced and the investigation was ongoing.

Pattern Behind Data Center Cargo Theft

The individual haul matters less than the pattern behind it. Verisk CargoNet’s analysis of 2025 found cargo theft losses rose about 60% to nearly $725 million, even though the number of supply chain crime events barely changed, 3,594 against 3,607 the year before. What changed was the value of each theft. The average rose about 36% to $273,990, which is what happens when organized groups stop taking whatever is on the truck and start choosing what to take. Metals theft climbed about 77%, driven largely by copper.

CargoNet also names the shift directly. Enterprise computing hardware has moved into the top tier of targets for organized criminal groups, alongside the metals and food shipments that have long dominated the numbers.

The reason is mundane. A data center consumes an enormous quantity of copper wiring, power equipment and cooling plant before a single server is switched on, and all of it arrives by road. Copper has traded at record prices this year, and a spool of it can be melted down into something with no serial number and no history. A pallet of switchgear sitting in a yard overnight has none of the protection the finished facility will eventually have.

The security spending in this industry is concentrated on the building. The fence line, the mantraps, the cameras, the access control. None of that is in place on the day the copper is still on a truck in Alabama.