Yves here. I can’t recall where I read it, but a recent article opined that the only use case that could make AI pay off was full-spectrum surveillance. So ever-increasing use of robot dogs by AI and data center players is an early warning of what is coming.
Also notice how insanely expensive these robot dogs are. Guards with guns would be much cheaper. So is this tech branding? Wasting money because this is part of the AI business model?
By Stephen Prager, staff writer at Common Dreams. Originally published at Common Dreams
As Americans grow fed up with the rapid encroachment of artificial intelligence data centers into their communities, tech companies are embracing a novel solution to protect their energy-sucking behemoths from danger: Even more robots… robot dogs, to be exact.
According to a report from Business Insider on Monday:
As companies pour billions into sprawling industrial campuses for cloud and AI computing, some data center operators are experimenting with four-legged bots—about the size of large dogs—that can patrol fences, inspect equipment, and flag any issues before they turn into costly outages.
These robots, known as “quadrupeds,” are being used to patrol the complexes, which can sometimes reach the size of multiple football fields.
Robot dogs are standing guard for tech companies, patrolling the massive data centers across the country that power AI operations. https://t.co/KhAf1RHYer
— FORTUNE (@FortuneMagazine) March 17, 2026
According to Fortune, tech companies are already pouring nearly $700 billion into building data centers across the US and are now spending hundreds of thousands of dollars more to enlist mechanical canines as security forces.
One model from Boston Dynamics, known as “Spot,” can cost anywhere from $175,000 to $300,000. And while the technology may seem futuristic, Spot and other quadrupeds like it have already been enlisted in law enforcement and public safety for years.
Another company—Ghost Robotics—advertises its quadrupeds for “reconnaissance, intelligence, and surveillance use by the military.”
With more than 5,000 data centers now in the US and 800-1,000 new ones in the process of being built, Michael Subhan, the chief growth officer for Ghost Robotics, told Business Insider he expects boom times are ahead for his industry.
As data centers expand their reach at breakneck speed, there may be more interlopers for the programmable pooches to sniff out.
Due to skyrocketing energy costs and water shortages in places where large data centers have been built, the sites of proposed projects from Illinois to Minnesota to South Carolina have drawn crowds of dozens and even hundreds of demonstrators in recent weeks.
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Those robot dogs can look pretty impressive. But so is a high-powered rifle with a telescopic sight firing armour-piercing bullets.
Exactly. When they are shown in movies or tv shows they never tire and bullets bounce off of them. Un relaity they need recharged every 90 minutes. And if they had enough arnour tk protect them they would not be able to move.
There are also likely low-tech methods to screw them up, like hitting them with fishing nets, so they get all entangled and can’t function.
A drone that drops a fishing net could be quite an effective countermeasure.
trebuchet featuring limb dismemberment would be great…of course the robot dog owners plan to have surveilled the entire globe and it’s inhabitants as if thats not really weird.
Not so low tech but I wonder how well they withstand a welding gun.
Low tech insofar as you can simply buy one, but you’d need to get right up close without the ‘dog’ moving away.
I’m curious if these robot dogs work in the rain. The sensors in my car sometimes go out in wet weather and also in a hard glare.
https://youtube.com/shorts/HZ69XsHyXzQ
Particularly interesting is the water balloon filled with old engine oil and sand
Totally. Paint balloons? Even milkshakes?
Tech bros too busy fellating themselves to see how some stupid easy grassroots guerilla tactics can eat their lunch.
But facial recognition and cell phone recognition would have to be thwarted, because big brother is definitely watching.
Why not boleadoras?
Kill them with fire (missing Lambert).
Exactly on both
I believe this was the plot in one of the Black Mirror episodes from a few years back. Kind of tired of these techbro squillionaires turning dystopian cautionary tales into instruction manuals.
At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from the Classic sci-fi novel “Don’t Create The Torment Nexus”
One of the best of the entire series: Metalhead (S4-E5)
Spot the dog by Boston Dynamics will run for 90 minutes on a single battery charge.
Possibilities of wireless jamming, sensor spoofing, etc
Boston Dynamics terms of use prohibit weaponization of the dogs so nothing is stopping people from stealing them.
At the very least, in addition to the cost of the dog itself, I would budget for robust network segmentation, monitoring, employee training, and possibly third-party security audits.
Boston may prohibit weaponization but Ghost Robotics and others who sell to the MIC have no such scruples. 🫠
I believe these Robot dogs are battery powered, where do the batteries come from?
Do these loyal doggies have any inputs from, say, China?
And as far as 1,000 more data centers being built, I am doubtful due to a number of factors, among them are supply chain issues and the insane amounts of $ that the AI industry has been burning with no ROI in sight.
They need MORE MONEY!!!, where is it going to come from given the realities of the War in the Mid East?
Middle Easten countries had invested or pledged to invest a lot in them. I’d suggest that is up im smoke now. But then again the govenrments just print money if needed.
Maybe the endgame is that they start their own country, so they’ll have their own central bank and can finance all they want.
How long before rival oligarchs send armies of AI robot dogs – and rats, snakes, mosquitoes, sharks & wotnot – after each other? All livestreamed, for subscribers only, of course.
Read Purgatory Mount by Adam Roberts. Although it encouraged me to invest in yummy crunchy cyanide capsules.
As a class I think they stick together.
They stick together in the face of threats to their class power. At other times they’re characterised by one-upmanship and backstabbing of all kinds. Which of them doesn’t dream of market dominance?
great novel by Matt Dinnaman–“Operation Bounce House” tell the tale
William Gibson should take notes
Must be easier to make robot dogs than robot cats.
Probably the laser thing
There is an old aphorism by Jean Cocteau that goes about like this: “If I prefer cats to dogs, it is because there are no police cats.”
The internet is such a wonderful place to learn how to turn old cameras into emp generators…
Did you by strange chance read this?
The future of the Department of Energy site, The Kentuckian, 9 February 2026.
I worry the future will be AI drones killing people who won’t put on their shock-collars. Mass slavery.
Drones are one way that the ruling class can finally outnumber the working class.
Robot ‘Dogs’ doing patrol on data centers which are needed no doubt to run the robot ‘dogs’…
Data centers seem like a scam to entrap modern humans into a political economy that attains the status of National Security. When in reality, they are just not needed.
I can imagine the early spruikers of the great pyramids, (yes pyramid scheme pun intended) telling Pharaoh, the structure will be needed to keep away the storm gods from drowning the Nile with too much flooding, and generations will be needed to build one. They do the math and figure a quick shekel can be made on the calcite processing for casting the blocks etc…
Thing is, will the data centers, and their ‘dogs’ last 3 500 years, even when obsolete in 20?
Well, Katherine Austin Fitts is proposing the digital infrastructure is mostly to facilitate a ‘control grid’ the new digital programmable money everyone will have to have soon, and hence that’s why all the vassal states of the USA are ‘deciding’ to invest.
I feel if she is even partway right, there might might end up being two groups, in the western hemisphere, and one looks decidedly like the rag dressed gutter people depicted in disaster movies, who don’t have access to Digital money, but work for food and that’s it..oh, but sleep in Trumps’ homeless re-education camps.
Well, parts of the planet are looking like disaster movies….What a mess.
So, if the Data Centers eat up all the electricity & water, and produce horrible results for the environment and people in general, what’s the breaking point?
Will an energy crisis put a stop to these fascist monstrosities? …Or will it make for a mad-max type scenario, where governments starve and kill their populations in the name of surveillance & control? Is there another scenario possible?
I would think that climate catastrophe will have some effect.
Will “Spot” jump 20m into the air with perfect timing to get smoked by an incoming drone and spare the data center a direct hit?
Didn’t think so.
They are sociopath nerds recreating one of their favourite books, Snow Crash?
[Snow Crash featured a badass cyborg dog]
“Musk is not the only powerful Silicon Valley figure whose world view has been shaped by science fiction. Peter Thiel, the billionaire investor whose support for Trump in 2016 prefigured that of Musk, is a fan of Neal Stephenson. Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash, which coined the term metaverse, envisages a post-federal America where cryptocurrencies have sapped the state of its ability to collect taxes. The federal government has been reduced to an impotent rump; sovereignty has devolved into a series of franchised “burbclaves”, private statelets ruled by CEO-kings who provide their citizens, or customers, with the basic infrastructure of society.
In 2000, when Thiel and Musk merged their rival start-ups to form PayPal (copies of Snow Crash dotted around the office), they had a piece of software installed on the company computer system. Every time a new customer signed up for a PayPal account, it played the sound of a ringing bell. It was known as the “World Domination Index”. The friendships and rivalries that were forged in those heady days coalesced into a loose fraternity known as the “PayPal mafia”, powerful people who hold sway in Silicon Valley to this day.”
Hiro Protagonist would be disgusted by them…
From: The myths that made Elon Musk (FT archived)
But the cyborg dog was a good guy! Sacrificed itself for YT.
They learned the wrong lessons and are making the evil version of the book!
Fwiw the dog was my favourite character.
Surely there have to be more efficient ways to ‘patrol fences, inspect equipment, and flag any issues before they turn into costly outages’. Equipment for example usually has self-diagnostics, and checks for physical damage or issues don’t need to be done on a daily basis (and a few fixed CCTV mounts would be a lot cheaper and probably accomplish the same thing). And what if they find a problem while they’re ‘patrolling fences’? Take a photo and report it to a human? Short of giving them steel jaws or gun mounts or any of the various dystopian possibilities, I don’t see a whole lot they could do. As Yves says, you could employ humans to do a better job for less money.
If you take a closer look at the article, it’s actually single sourced, and the source works for (you guessed it!) Boston Dynamics:
Translation: there’s a huge amount of dumb money sloshing around in the AI data center buildout, and we’d like a piece of that action. No examples are given of this actually taking place anywhere, and no customers are named.
I suspect this is Cambridge Analytica or luxury doomsday bunkers in New Zealand all over again – a puff marketing piece disguised as reporting, with a catchy hook for the conspiracy theorists, giving us all the opportunity to take alarm and read a whole lot more into it than actually exists.
I can absolutely see tech billionaires with more money than sense paying a lot for these despite the lack of a business case because they think the idea is cool. There’s probably a targeted marketing campaign specifically for fans of Snow Crash.
Proof of concept as prelude to get rid of human guards in any number of places.
Thank you to the commentariat for the speculation about the modern equivalent of throwing a poisoned steak over the fence.
Wait until the owners of these data centers realize that their massive concrete facilities, complete with good logistical connections, security perimeters, robot guards, city-sized power inputs, and generous taxpayer subsidies, can also be used as mass-electrocution and incineration centers.
I mean, anyone with some small technical knowledge can build an emp. Or ten.