The Cloud Has a Street Address—and Thieves Can Find It

Using the 2007 Verizon data center heist as a case study, the article argues that cloud infrastructure remains a physical target: attackers used social engineering and impersonation to bypass guards and remove servers, and the same classes of risk scale up as AI ‘factories’ concentrate valuable chips, models and sensitive data. It warns that protecting AI data centers requires integrated security across physical, personnel, operational technology and cyber domains—covering access verification, contractor screening, equipment tracking, resilient power/cooling and oversight of automated security systems—to mitigate theft, sabotage, espionage and disruption.