NSA Utah Data Center, Utah

The NSA’s data center in Bluffdale, south of Salt Lake City, opened in 2014, and is likely the largest data processing center in the country. Construction started in January 2011, ten miles south of the Bingham Pit (the world’s largest mining pit), on the grounds of Camp Williams, an already existing military training reservation, operated by the National Guard. The 1.5 million square foot complex surrounds a 100,000 square foot computer brain that helps the NSA process its load of collected information, a few yottabytes (quadrillion gigabytes) or so of which are stored here, consuming more than 65 megawatts to keep alive. This site was selected partially based on the abundant electricity in the Salt Lake area, and the two major electric lines converging near Camp Williams. The NSA’s headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland, has apparently maxed out it’s local electrical grid. This is just one of a few recently constructed processing centers for the NSA. Others include the Texas Cryptologic Center in San Antonio, and the Security Operations Center, at Fort Gordon, near Augusta, Georgia. The Bluffdale site cost around $3 billion.