NEW YORK, July 8 — The economics of a data center construction site have become a magnet for organised theft, according to industry and law enforcement reports, with copper wiring and networking equipment vanishing from remote building sites at a pace that now costs the U.S. economy more than $1 billion annually. A 2024 report from the Security Industry Association put that figure on the record, quantifying the vulnerability of an industry that, under the hood, depends on enormous quantities of high-value raw material.
A single data center facility requires up to 50,000 pounds of copper for its wiring and grounding systems — a technical reality that makes each construction site a concentrated target. Thieves are not working alone.
The FBI’s 2023 report on organised retail crime noted that construction site theft is increasingly linked to broader criminal networks. These are not opportunistic snatch-and-grab operations but organised rings using trucks to haul away copper spools, generators, and networking equipment. The scale of the operation matches the scale of the prize.
The detail that matters is the scrap metal market, where the stolen copper finds its exit. The Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries reported that recyclers paid an average of $3.20 per pound for copper in 2024.
At that price, a single data center’s 50,000 pounds of copper represents $160,000 in potential scrap value — and that is before factoring in the resale of generators and networking gear. As ever, the regulatory picture is uneven. Many scrap metal recyclers are required under state laws to document the identity of sellers, but enforcement varies widely from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.
That patchwork creates gaps that organised rings exploit, moving stolen material across state lines to recyclers with lighter oversight. Data center construction sites present a particular set of vulnerabilities. They tend to be located in remote areas, away from dense urban policing.
They operate on 24-hour construction schedules, which means materials arrive and are staged around the clock. And they hold large quantities of valuable material in plain view — copper spools, backup generators, networking switches — for weeks or months at a time.
The Security Industry Association report did not break out data center theft as a separate line item from construction site theft generally, but the numbers specific to the sector make the pattern clear. The $1 billion annual figure covers the broader construction industry. Data centers, with their extraordinary copper requirements and remote locations, represent a disproportionate share of that loss.
What to watch next is whether federal law enforcement begins to treat data center construction theft as a distinct category of organised crime. The FBI’s 2023 report already flagged the link to broader criminal networks.
The question now is whether the scrap metal recycling industry will face tighter federal documentation requirements, closing the enforcement gap that state-level variation has left open.
