- Defense in depth
- The principle that no single control is trusted to hold, so independent layers of protection are stacked such that defeating one still leaves an attacker facing others. It reframes security around how far an intruder can travel after an inevitable first failure, making segmentation and detection as important as prevention.
- Insider threat
- Risk posed by people who already hold legitimate access, whether malicious actors, negligent staff, or users whose credentials have been compromised by an outsider. Because their actions can look authorized and they start inside the trust boundary, the countermeasures are least privilege, separation of duties, behavioral monitoring, screening, and prompt deprovisioning.
- IT/OT divide
- The deliberate separation between the information-technology network that runs the business and AI workloads and the operational-technology network that runs power and cooling. Keeping them segmented, with any connection passing through tightly controlled chokepoints, prevents an attacker on the business side from directly commanding plant controllers.
- Operational technology (OT)
- The systems that run a facility's physical plant, including the controllers, sensors, and building-management systems that govern power distribution, uninterruptible supplies, generators, and cooling. OT prizes availability and stability, often runs legacy industrial protocols that assume a friendly network, and is where a cyber attack can produce physical consequences.
- Shared responsibility
- The contractual division of security duties among the facility operator, the cloud or platform provider, and the tenant, each owning part of the stack. Because failures most often hide in the seams where each party assumes another owns a control, the responsibility matrix is treated as a security artifact to be examined for gaps.
- Supply-chain compromise
- An attack that plants a weakness upstream, in hardware, firmware, or software, so it arrives pre-installed and legitimate-looking before a system is ever powered on. Patterns include hardware manipulation, firmware implants beneath the operating system, and poisoned trusted updates. Defenses include provenance verification, integrity attestation, software bills of materials, and vendor risk management.
- Threat surface
- The full set of points where an AI data center can be attacked, understood as four connected layers: enterprise and cloud IT, operational technology, physical security and access control, and the software and hardware supply chain. Treated as one whole because real attacks cross the seams between the layers.
- Zero trust
- A security posture that grants no access based on network location and instead verifies every request, checking identity, device health, and least-privilege authorization under the rule never trust, always verify. It confines the blast radius of a single compromised credential and is essential where enormous value is concentrated inside the perimeter.