A 200 server data center and a networked hospital, gas station, and houses offer a rare public window into which civilian systems the bureau thinks attackers will hit next, and what 'air gapped' actually guarantees.
Inside the FBI's 22,000-square-foot replica town in Huntsville, Alabama, a convenience store sits next to a hospital, a gas station, and fully furnished houses, and every one of them is wired to be hacked. The bureau calls the facility the Kinetic Cyber Range, and it opened sometime last year as a physical rehearsal space for the kind of cyberattack most Americans have only read about: ones that cut power, freeze hospital systems, or turn a car's infotainment screen into a forensic puzzle for the next investigator on scene.
The facility is the size of a small city block. The FBI has framed it as a modern, digital-crime analog to Hogan's Alley, the Quantico-based firearms training town the bureau has used for decades. The new range swaps bullets for bandwidth. Inside the buildings, a small data center houses more than 200 servers that can be infected with malware, taken over, and then forensically dissected by students learning how attacks actually move through civilian systems, according to The Verge. All of it sits behind an air gap, the bureau says, so that malicious code never escapes into the live internet.
That last point is the one the FBI is most eager to make, and it is also the one worth pressing on. An air gap is a real engineering boundary, but training ranges of this kind have a track record of close calls, and "isolated from the outside world" depends on who wired the routers and how often the configuration is audited. A facility that simulates attacks on hospital networks, power grids, corporate security systems, and home networks is, by design, a place where the worst-case code is allowed to run. The public's standing to know how that is governed is not part of the bureau's public-facing tour, per the official FBI video released the week of June 14, 2026.
What the range does show, more clearly than any policy paper, is which civilian targets the FBI considers realistic enough to rehearse against. The convenience store, the gas station, and the houses are not set dressing. They are the surfaces attackers have actually probed in the last five years, from retail point-of-sale breaches to ransomware that hops from a corporate VPN into a building automation system. The hospital replica matters because health care has been among the most disrupted sectors in U.S. ransomware incidents. The home network and car infotainment stations matter because every new connected device is a potential foothold, and the bureau evidently wants investigators who can pull a compromised head unit off a seized vehicle and read what it did.
Huntsville itself is part of the story. The city has been a federal cyber hub for years, anchored by Redstone Arsenal and the proximity of Marshall Space Flight Center, and a kinetic cyber range fits the long-running build-out of cyber and intelligence work in north Alabama rather than breaking from it.
The interesting question the facility surfaces is not whether the FBI can build a fake town. It clearly can. The question is what a kinetic range tells us about the threat model the bureau is now training to. If the answer is "the same civilian systems your town runs on," then the rehearsal is only as useful as the relationship the bureau builds with the people who run those systems in the real world: utility operators, hospital IT staff, municipal networks, and the small offices that hold the credentials attackers actually steal. A 22,000-square-foot replica can teach investigators what a compromise looks like. It cannot, on its own, make the next county over ready for one.
The FBI's primary materials on the range are published at fbi.gov, though the bureau's pages were intermittently blocked behind a verification interstitial at the time of writing; the description of the facility, the 200-server data center, and the air-gap claim above are drawn from The Verge's reporting and the FBI's own video tour.