The world is connected by copper. It's a huge target for thieves

An AT&T crew installs a new cable at a railroad crossing in Hayward, Calif., after the segment got cut down by suspected copper wire thieves. John Ruwitch/NPR hide caption toggle caption John Ruwitch/NPR Stay up to date with our Up First newsletter sent every weekday morning. HAYWARD, Calif. – In an industrial yard off a highway east of San Francisco, AT&T workers crowd around cold, hard evidence of a growing problem. "Sitting here [is] a truck full of what is stolen copper cable," says Todd Swensen, from AT&T's construction and engineering division. The jumble of cables and wires, about the size of a truck tire, was recovered from a metal recycler. Swensen says that cable actually belongs to AT&T, and was cut down from telephone poles by thieves. Over the past few years, there has been an alarming rise in copper wire theft in the United States and beyond. The value of copper has roughly doubled in the past year, thanks in part to increasing demand for the metal. So thieves strip it from phone lines, as well as from other infrastructure like streetlamps and EV chargers. Repairs cost companies and communities, vex corporate executives and politicians and tax work crews. Swensen says record-high prices of copper — buoyed, in part, by the artificial intelligence data center boom — are to blame. "The higher the price of copper is at a recycler and on the market, our theft goes up. Direct correlation there," he says. …