The planned structure provides 1 to 1.5 million square feet,[16][17][18] with 100,000 square feet of data center space and more than 900,000 square feet of technical support and administrative space.[5][16] It is projected to cost $1.5-2 billion.[3][19][20][5][16] A report suggested that it will cost another $2 billion for hardware, software, and maintenance.[16] The completed facility is expected to require 65 megawatts of electricity, costing about $40 million per year.[5][16] The facility is expected to use 1.7 million gallons (6500 tons) of water per day.[21] An article by Forbes estimates the storage capacity as between 3 and 12 exabytes in the near term, based on analysis of unclassified blueprints, but mentions Moore's Law, meaning that advances in technology could be expected to increase the capacity by orders of magnitude in the coming years.[2]
You can check out the sources on your own. Obviously the NSA's job is to lie and mislead people about the USA's surveillance capabilities, so take all those figures with a grain of salt.
The compound is obviously target #1 for a whole host of terrorist types, not to mention other countries. Since information is the key to power, and that's where they keep all the information, anyone who wants to undermine US hegemony - Islamic fundies, communist haters, Chinese/Russian nationalists, etc - would like to destroy it. Right-wing domestic terrorists who hate a strong centralized government would obviously like to destroy it. Christian fundies who fear the "number of the beast" type tracking might want to destroy it. Left-wing, Earth First, ELF-type terrorists would obviously want to destroy it. Pretty much every citizen of the United States would be relieved if it were destroyed, since all our search histories are on there and Jesus fuck, we don't want anyone knowing that shit! And there the NSA Utah Data Center is, sitting out there in the middle of the desert with a bunch of employees, waiting to be destroyed.
So, I got to thinking about that, and remembered one of Carl Sagan's books, "Contact." Sagan worked for several big public projects for the US government, most famously the Voyager spacecraft. He knew how the US government, and governments in general, worked. To summarize the plot, the US and Soviet governments both build giant, expensive machines using instructions beamed to Earth from outer space. The Soviet one falls apart, because of communism; the US one gets blown up, because of terrorism. But then, the protagonist finds out that there is a super secret third machine, built by a private corporation, hidden on an island in northern Japan. That's the one that eventually works. The key line is (I'm paraphrasing, because my memory sucks), "When it comes to giant public works projects, why build one super expensive machine when you can build two?"
So, I keep thinking that the NSA Utah Data Center must be a dummy. I mean, sure, information is probably stored there, but there's got to be a second one somewhere else. Any thoughts on where it might be? I'm going to guess Adak Island in Alaska, because why not. Anyone else?