Walmart['s Data Center in Jane Missouri] is only the largest and most spectacular of a whole new field of stealth data-center architecture—what London architectural critic Martin Pawley called 'terminal architecture' in his 1998 book of the same name. Such buildings are springing up in the most unlikely locations, spreading a whole incipient geography of backup and repair across the world. Near the core of global finance epicenters such as London and New York, for example, bunker-like business continuity facilities cluster, ready to go into operation to support corporate data flows and archives whenever the main corporate headquarters or electronic trading floor faces a disruption of any kind. Areas adjacent to corporate and financial downtowns, such as London Docklands and New Jersey, are now chock-full of such fortified centers, and the specialized firms that operate them now constitute an important economic sector in their own right.
Meanwhile, in the downtown cores, disused and obsolescent modernist tower-blocks have been converted into so-called telecom hotels. Their windows blacked out, these structures house web servers and major digital switching systems connected directly to the planet’s fiber-optic grids. They allow the world’s major communications providers to serve the world’s major metropolitan markets cheaply, efficiently, and with minimal vulnerability to disruption.
Far away from these metropolitan hubs, data backup and storage centers increasingly occupy the world’s nooks and crannies. The accumulated regolith of military architecture, abandoned since the late twentieth century, offers prime real estate for reconstruction as data centers. Abandoned military bunkers, especially, lend themselves to repurposing as ultrasecure data archiving and backup facilities. In northern Washington, DC, for example, a missile control bunker from the early years of the Cold War has been turned into an ultrasecure data center known as 'Titan 1.' An abandoned intercontinental ballistic missile silo near Albuquerque, New Mexico, has been similarly retrofitted. In Europe parallel refits have been completed using World War II antiaircraft forts off the coast of South East England and civilian antinuclear bunkers deep below the Swiss Alps.