Meet the $300K Robot Dogs Guarding Massive Data Centers - eWeek

The robot dog is not a gimmick. It is a $300,000 mobile sensor platform with a vendor-reported 18-month payback against the going rate for a human security guard.

Boston Dynamics Spot and Ghost Robotics Vision 60 are in limited early-stage deployments at data centers in North America, according to senior executives at both companies speaking to Business Insider this month. The pitch is concrete: a Spot configuration loaded with inspection payloads runs $175,000 to $300,000, and Boston Dynamics tells customers to expect a payoff within 18 months — a figure the company attributes to its own sales projections. A human security guard costs roughly $150,000 per year, does not work around the clock, takes sick days, and does not come with a two-year warranty.

Merry Frayne, senior director of product management at Boston Dynamics, told Business Insider she was at a data center this week and described a significant increase in inquiries over the past year — driven, she said, by the scale of AI infrastructure investment. North America has 35 gigawatts of data-center capacity currently under construction, according to JLL, a commercial real estate firm. The largest facilities span dozens of acres, operating 24/7 with physical perimeters that fixed cameras cannot fully cover.

The Vision 60 from Ghost Robotics serves a different but related function. Michael Subhan, chief growth officer at Ghost Robotics, told Business Insider that the Vision 60 handles external perimeter security — patrolling fence lines, identifying barrier breaches, spotting suspicious packages, and feeding video to a control room. The MSRP starts at $165,000 depending on configuration. Subhan described the model explicitly: instead of two human guards at $300,000 per year, one guard plus one robot.

Neither company is positioning these machines as replacements for human guards. The framing from both executives is consistent: the robot is an extra set of eyes that can traverse terrain and cover distance that a human patrol cannot, in any weather, without fatigue. Humans watch the feed and make decisions. The robot carries the sensors and does the walking.

What makes the economics work is the payload. A base Spot with no add-ons is a patrol robot. A Spot configured with thermal cameras, acoustic sensors, gas detectors, and leak detection hardware is an industrial inspection platform that happens to also patrol. Boston Dynamics customers — Frayne said — typically buy for more than perimeter security. Data center buyers specifically want site mapping, construction monitoring, and the ability to detect a thermal anomaly or a water leak before it becomes an outage.

That distinction matters for how to think about the market. This is not a security novelty. It is a labor arbitrage combined with a sensor platform, sold into a moment when the four largest hyperscalers are collectively spending approximately $700 billion on capital expenditures in 2026, and data center operators are under pressure to protect assets that, if they go offline, cost millions per hour. A robot that can inspect equipment and catch a cooling system failure before it trips a breaker is worth more than the hardware price alone.

The current deployments are modest. Ghost Robotics says it has a handful of data center customers. Boston Dynamics describes data centers as a top industrial category — the same category that includes oil, mining, and utilities. The question is whether the 35 gigawatts under construction creates a meaningful inflection point, or whether the economics have been this compelling for longer and the market is simply waking up to it.

The answer probably depends on what happens to guard labor costs and whether the sensor payload market expands. If Spot can be equipped to detect specific equipment failures before they happen — and Boston Dynamics and its customers start publishing reliability data — the robot transitions from security guard with sensors to predictive maintenance platform on legs. That is a different product, at a different price point, with a different buyer conversation.

Sources: Business Insider, March 16, 2026, reporting by Lloyd Lee. Quotes from Merry Frayne, senior director of product management, Boston Dynamics, and Michael Subhan, chief growth officer, Ghost Robotics. JLL data center capacity figures cited in Fortune, March 17, 2026.