As stories about the building's frequent problems with power and water usage came out, the choice seemed even weirder and more arbitrary. Why put the infinite archive of state surveillance in a place so vulnerable to drought? What was the appeal? I kept these questions in mind as I went on my own reluctant pilgrimage to the Salt Lake region's other prominent temple to a controversial faith with a questionable origin story.

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I drove to Bluffdale from Wendover, a town on the Utah-Nevada border that is home to, among other things, the first transcontinental telephone call and an airplane hangar that once housed the Enola Gay. This particular stretch of route 80 in northern Utah is a landscape narrated by Werner Herzog—vast expanses of crystallized white salt against hazy white skies, most of it home to unseen Department of Defense operations. The Hill Air Force Base, the Utah Test and Training Range, the Dugway Proving Ground, and the Tooele Chemical Agent Disposal Facility all call this stretch of wasteland home, in part because there is enough empty space to do things like chemical weapons testing and drone-pilot training.

These many DoD outposts aren’t why the Economic Development Corporation of Utah says the state’s a great place for data centers. Instead, they mention that it's generally untouched by natural disasters, and it’s a pretty secure region given that it’s very isolated and spacious. It’s also in proximity to a lot of Internet backbone, and the state “has a long and distinguished history in the high-tech industry,” which presumably makes it easier to find skilled IT workers.

That long and distinguished history really kicked off around 1969, when the University of Utah was made one of the four original nodes of ARPANET. Its presence in that initial constellation (the only non-California node in the network) was largely due to the efforts of David C. Evans, a Utah native who had been teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, when ARPA was just getting started. The U of U lured him back to Salt Lake to create and chair their new computer-science program. He brought his DoD connections with him, and an ARPA contract named “Graphical Man/Machine Communications” that funded a lot of the department's early activities.

Evans's reports to the DoD and papers published under the contract are available online via the university library. They’re pretty amazing documents of Internet and computer-graphics history—one features an abstract of Alan Kay’s dissertation. Other U of U computer-science alumnae have been involved in the formation of companies like Silicon Graphics, Pixar, and Adobe.

Today, the University of Utah's computer-science program continues to have interesting DoD ties. When the NSA Data Center was initially being built, the agency worked with the university to develop a data-center-engineering certificate program, essentially building a pipeline for students to continue to support Utah's data-center industry, with one data center in particular presumably needing a lot of support (U of U also has a Big Data certificate program; weirdly, neither of these programs currently require any ethics coursework).