The Soft Underside of Redundancy
The AI build-out pushed copper to record highs through 2025 — up roughly 30% on the year — and made every cable run a payday. Thieves have hit live and under-construction sites accordingly, including a coaxial-cable theft at a South Carolina facility in January 2026.
Data centers are interdependence made physical. The whole architecture is built on redundancy — yet one stripped feed or severed run can ripple across racks, services and the customers downstream, because the physical layer sits underneath all that clever failover. Strip the copper and the redundancy above it never gets the chance to work. The cascade starts below the software.
Tamper-resistant enclosures and fixings on cabinets, conduit and field cabling are the unglamorous layer that keeps a copper grab from escalating into an outage.
