[jeffbee]

NSA does not have large-scale storage. If they did, it would be in a building somewhere, it would have electric power and they would have bought storage devices for it from some company. The largest-known actual NSA datacenter is the size of a runty leftover from having built a real cloud datacenter, and there's only one of those while FAMG have hundreds of far larger datacenters.

[CobrastanJorji]

Phew, glad the NSA doesn't have any large scale storage. Big relief. By the way, what do they use their $10 billion AWS contract for?

[jeffbee]

I know it's not storing every email, phone call, photo, and video ever transmitted on the internet, like certain people want you to believe.

A $10b AWS contract would not even amount to enough storage to keep one copy of the public web.

[pavs]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center#%3A%7E%3Atext...

Very confidently incorrect.

[jeffbee]

If you think 100,000 square feet is a large data center, you obviously do not work in the industry.

[subtra3t]

Ad hominem much?

[resolutebat]

I'm fairly sure the budget of archive.is is less than $10B. (Admittedly they don't store videos though.)

[taylorfinley]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center

Genuine question, is Exabyte-scale small in the context of cloud? Is Amazon stacking yottabytes?

Edit: 'Exabyte scale' was from a Forbes article in 2013

[jeffbee]

If you think this is a large datacenter, you are mistaken. You could fit this inside any cloud datacenter, and there are hundreds of those. The NSA thing draws 65MW. Google alone has over 7000MW of first-party energy generation resources, that doesn't begin to account for what they draw from the grid, and they're not even the biggest datacenter owner.

[elorant]

A building somewhere. Like inside a military base for example. Good luck finding out what’s inside it and having anyone who worked on a restricted contract telling you about it.

[unethical_ban]

Given the history of NSA, warrantless surveillance and the overt existence of the Utah data center + collaboration with telcos and big tech, and the promise of AI analysis and quantum computing...

I find it difficult to accept your underlying premise that NSA doesn't have access to a massive amount of data which AI may be able to analyze for them.