Persistent electrical surges at a National Security Agency hub has delayed the center’s opening for over a year.
The center, located in Bluffdale, Utah, has lost hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of machinery since the problems began, The Wall Street Journal reports. The center has experienced 10 meltdowns in the past 13 months. The subsequent fiery explosions have melted metal and caused circuits to fail. According to reports, each time there’s a circuit explosion, it costs over $100,000 to fix.
The Utah facility is a huge project, spanning more than one million square feet of country and costing $1.4 billion in construction alone. The Cray supercomputers, costing $500,000 a piece, will also eventually reside there. While the causes for the surges are still unknown, the project officials are divided as to whether proposed solutions will work. Plans to turn on some of its computers this week have been delayed.
As per protocol of the clandestine NSA, the exact amount of data that will be stored there is classified. The Army Corps of Engineers dispatched its Tiger Team over the summer, and they determined that the cause of the failures remained unknown in all but two cases, the Journal reports.