Massive National Security Agency data center to land in Utah
What does one stuff into a $1.1 billion, 1 million-square-ft data center? Well the super secret National Security Agency won’t tell you exactly but this week it awarded the contract to start building one in Utah.
What the data center in Utah’s Camp Williams will include is 100,000 square feet of computer space dedicated to collecting data from the country’s intelligence agencies. There will also be about 900,000 square feet of technical support and administrative space in addition to an electrical substation, a vehicle inspection building and visitor control center, fuel and water storage structures and a chiller plant.
What kind of data center can you build with $500 million?
The contract went to a joint venture made up of Balfour Beatty, DPR Construction and Big-D. DPR has tons of data center construction experience and is currently building the $188 million, 147,000-square-foot Facebook data center in Oregon.
According to datacenterknowledge.com the Utah economic development officials have estimated that the 1 million square foot project could involve 7,000 workers or more during the peak of construction.
The Social Security Administration was last year authorized to replace its National Computer Center for a little over $500 million. The SSA at the time said it would need closer to $800 million to fund a new IT infrastructure, including the new data center-the physical building, power and cooling infrastructure, IT hardware, and systems applications.
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