A convicted armed robber, Terry Ellis, has revealed details of a 2007 heist in which his gang, posing as police officers with a dog named Buster, broke into a fortress-like Verizon data centre in King's Cross, London. The raid, which Ellis called his "criminal Mount Everest", targeted computer chips containing highly sensitive banking data and was commissioned by a criminal "banking syndicate", highlighting how vulnerable even heavily secured data infrastructure could be to determined, well-planned intrusion.

The gang stole Pentium chips worth around £5 million, but the banking data stored on them was reportedly worth some £100 million to those who ordered the theft. Getting into and out of the three-floor, two-acre complex beside Regent's Canal required bypassing eight layers of security, and the operation's audacity later saw it nicknamed the "Ocean's Eleven robbery" after the 2001 heist film. The story has now inspired a novel, Cloudthief by Nathaniel Rich, and is being revisited nearly two decades on as data centres have become central to the global economy and the AI industry.