Thieves take $200 000 of copper piping from Virginia data center site

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Thieves target Culpeper data center construction site, take $200K worth of copper piping – WTOP News wtop.com

Thieves have taken more than $200,000 worth of copper piping from a data center construction site in Culpeper County, Virginia, in three overnight break-ins over a month. The first theft, between September 22 and 23, saw suspects cut a padlock on the Germanna Highway site's front gate and empty locked storage areas of a large quantity of copper piping. Sheriff Timothy Chilton said the size and weight of the haul means at least one large vehicle was used.

The suspects returned overnight between October 18 and 19, cutting through the perimeter fence on the east side, taking power tools, and appearing on camera — two masked, gloved males. They came back a third time between October 21 and 22, entering through the same cut in the fence and wearing the same clothing, newly installed cameras recorded. "These are not random hits," Chilton said. "The same two people have come back three times in a month, and they know how to get in and out."

The thefts land at the intersection of two price signals. Copper has been trading high enough that scrap metal in a storage yard is worth organizing a crew and a truck around, and the AI construction boom has scattered hundreds of semi-guarded sites across rural Virginia — each one stacked with exactly the materials that are expensive, slow to replace and easy to resell. The sheriff's office is now asking whether anyone has been offered copper or a large lot of power tools "at an unusually low price."

For the developers and insurers behind the data center buildout, the arithmetic is straightforward: the thefts happened between roughly 10 p.m. and 2 a.m., three times, through the same fence cut. Fencing, locks and cameras arrived only after $200,000 of piping had already left the property.