Two trailers stopped near Chicago held $1.3 million in stolen copper and equipment. Investigators from the Cook County Sheriff’s Office recovered both, and the loads had come from construction sites in the US boom in artificial intelligence data centers.
Those sites eat copper. The wiring that feeds a data center’s power demand is expensive next to aluminum or steel, and once it is stolen, its origin is close to impossible to trace. Thieves working the transport routes between sites in different states know it.
The numbers behind the problem are large. The National Insurance Crime Bureau counted $725 million in cargo theft in 2025. By the first quarter of 2026 it had already logged 767 incidents worth $132 million. Electronics made up 22 percent of everything stolen last year, and the average theft grew from roughly $200,000 to $275,000.
Not just copper
Chicago is not the only case. Police in Reno, Nevada, recovered semiconductors and Apple equipment worth $15 million. In California, Nvidia chips worth more than $7 million vanished from a warehouse in late 2024.
Some of the haul never stays in the country. Experts cited in reports say the black market price of the Nvidia RTX 6000 Pro card in China has doubled since the start of the year, which feeds demand for parts taken from American supply chains.
David Warrick, an executive vice president at the supply chain security firm Overhaul, described the criminal math bluntly: “The economics have become just crazy from the criminal opportunistic perspective.” He said the people behind it are no amateurs. “When we say organized crime, we actually mean organized crime,” he said of international syndicates that run like large corporations.
Warrick compares the contest to an arms race. Shipping companies tighten up, and the thieves get better at tracking the routes that carry valuable equipment and construction materials to data centers.
Who pays
Builders face higher bills for transport security and insurance. In communities that host the projects, theft gives skeptics another argument in the debate over whether the data center boom does them any good.
Investigators are still working on both trailers seized near Chicago. Law enforcement officials say this is only the beginning of the fight against a new type of organized crime.
Sources
- Organized Crime Rings Are Stealing Copper and Equipment from AI Data Center Construction Sites
- AI Data Center Theft on the Rise: $1.3M Stolen in Recent Heists | Gary Kucher posted on the topic | LinkedIn
Sources
- Thieves Are Now Targeting AI Data Center Construction Sites … – VICE
- Organized Crime Rings Are Stealing Copper and Equipment…
