Ripple effect: The AI boom may be hurting consumers, white-collar workers, and rural residents living near data centers, but it's opened up "new opportunities" for cargo thieves. Criminals are reportedly cashing in on the data center construction boom by stealing millions of dollars' worth of server hardware, cables, and other high-value tech equipment.
Law enforcement officials in Illinois recently recovered two trailers carrying an estimated $1.3 million worth of data center equipment at a truck yard in the Chicago metro area. Investigators with the Cook County Sheriff's Office opened their investigation after being tipped off on June 18 about a trailer holding roughly $300,000 worth of copper wire spools.
Officials believe the wire was stolen from Pine Hill, Alabama, before turning up in Illinois. According to FreightPulse, the trailer could be traced because it had an embedded GPS tracker that kept transmitting its location from the Chicago-area facility, near the 2,500 block of East Higgins Road.
The trailer's original Alabama plate, however, had been swapped for one from Indiana in an apparent attempt to throw off investigators. That Indiana plate, it turned out, had itself been reported stolen in Wisconsin. It's unclear whether anyone has been arrested in connection with the thefts.
Cook County officials went on to find a second trailer at the same truck yard, carrying about $1 million worth of data center infrastructure equipment, after the yard's owner told them the suspects had dropped it off a week earlier. That trailer's contents, investigators later determined, had been stolen out of Jacksonville, Florida.
Authorities haven't disclosed the identities of the trailers' owners or where the cargo was ultimately headed. Still, the case underscores a broader shift: cargo thieves, who've traditionally gone after metals, electronics, and construction materials, are increasingly setting their sights on high-value data center hardware.
The trend isn't new. In June 2025, thieves stole about $1.4 million worth of Nintendo Switch 2 consoles from a truck stopped in Colorado en route to Texas, and a shipment of EVGA RTX 30 series graphics cards was hijacked in Southern California back in 2021. Plenty of similar incidents have surfaced over the years, though most remain unsolved or haven't led to prosecutions.