Follow the Megawatts: An imperfect map of the data centers in Hawaiʻi
 | Chances are, NSA surveillance programs are processed in part through a data center here, like at the Rochefort Building near Wahiawā. It’s a $358 million facility where the NSA intercepts communications. Snowden worked at the old building this one replaced. He walked out with documents that proved a lot of that listening was aimed at ordinary people, like an illegal court order forcing Verizon to hand over the call records of every American customer. Data centers drive so much good like health care, banking, and systems that keep society running. But they also drive things like mass surveillance and military attack plans. I could not find a source for data centers here so cobbled this imperfect but insightful guide. We have a couple dozen data centers built or being built. Ours are much smaller than those million-gallons-a-day thirsty facilities. Nine show up in the standard directories. DRFortress, Lumen, Hawaiian Telcom Endeavor, AlohaNAP, Cogent, the two Servpacs, the UH ITS hub at Mānoa, and Hawaiian Telcom Kawaihae. The rest took more digging. NCTAMS Pacific in Wahiawā is one of the largest naval communication stations in the world. INDOPACOM’s Nimitz-MacArthur Command Center is about 275,000 square feet and runs the Pacific theater. DISA Pacific runs a classified site at Pearl Harbor-Hickam. The Maui High Performance Computing Center in Kīhei is one of five DoD Supercomputing Resource Centers. UH Mānoa runs the Koa supercomputer. My guess is we host around 60 megawatts of data center load. For scale, a docked cruise ship pulls about 8 megawatts, so roughly seven cruise ships plugged in 24/7. Residential solar drives so much of our grid that these facilities are partially running on power that ʻohana financed and now host. More is coming. The Navy is building a roughly 170,000 square foot Joint Intelligence Operations Center. AlohaNAP is adding 1.5 megawatts. Servpac broke ground on Building 2 at Mililani. We are powering a federal Pacific strategy that does not need our consent, just our grid and ʻāina. [link] [comments] |
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