The AI infrastructure buildout has been covered extensively in terms of chips, power consumption, and capital expenditure. Less discussed is what all of that new capacity means for physical security. As hyperscale data centers multiply to keep up with AI demand, they’re becoming denser, more valuable, and more targeted by the threat that many facilities weren’t built to prioritize people.
The 2026 AFCOM State of the Data Center report delivered a striking finding: for the first time in a decade, human threats ranked as the top concern among data center operators. The same report found that the large majority of respondents had changed their physical security requirements over the past two years. The most common changes are more comprehensive surveillance, tighter vendor and contractor vetting, and stronger perimeter and access controls.
That last point deserves emphasis. For years, data center security discussions centered almost entirely on cybersecurity — firewalls, encryption, and intrusion detection. The physical side was treated as a solved problem. But as facilities have grown denser and more valuable per square foot, industry analysts note that the real risk has shifted inside the perimeter, concentrated at the rack level, where a single bypassed door or an unvetted contractor can expose enormous quantities of sensitive data and equipment.
Given that a single data center can span hundreds of thousands of square feet, human guards alone can’t provide a level of continuous coverage — which is why operators are increasingly pairing trained security staff with AI-assisted monitoring that can triage alerts and let people focus on the ones that matter.
For an industry racing to build capacity as fast as possible, the AFCOM findings are a useful check. As the value concentrated inside these buildings grows, so does the incentive for bad actors — and vendors, contractors, and insiders — to find a way in.
Sources: AFCOM, “2026 State of the Data Center Report,” as reported via Data Center Knowledge (cbinsights.com)
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