Securing the Backbone of Artificial Intelligence
Updated: Sep 17
Securing the Backbone of Artificial Intelligence: Protecting Data
Centers
New America | Cybersecurity Report
Seungmin (Helen) Lee | September 4, 2025
Abstract
With the explosion in demand for artificial intelligence (AI) data centers to support the exponential integration of AI into businesses, operations, governments, and daily lives, the cybersecurity of AI data centers is becoming increasingly important. Given that AI data centers host AI models, weights, and training data, these centers face an expanded set of threats—particularly related to hardware, model, and geopolitical security. This report recommends a new framework to develop more cyber-secure AI data centers. The framework proposes an alignment and implementation of technical, corporate policy, and national governance approaches across six layers of security: (1) hardware & compute, (2) network & storage, (3) model & data, (4) software & application, (5) physical access, and (6) geopolitical.
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