Corporations dig deeper: using bunkers to secure data (and their CEOs)

Large corporations are shopping for underground bunkers that can survive a nuclear blast to protect their data centers and C-suite employees as geopolitical tensions rise. The first adopters are primarily cryptocurrency firms, companies that build the facilities told Semafor.

Larry Hall, owner of Kansas-based Survival Condo, said he recently priced an underground data center and executive suite space to a crypto company for $64 million. Survival Condo counts eight companies in the planning stages of building bunkers, three of which are competing to purchase an existing 150,000-square-foot facility in Kansas serving the same purpose — a project started by a Big Oil billionaire who died before it was completed.

The pitch is the apocalypse. “The nuclear clock is moving closer to midnight,” Hall intoned in a telephone interview from the company’s Kansas bunker facility, a 54,000-square-foot residential space outfitted with a rock wall and hydroponics farm. “The more worries there are in the headline news, the more people look for solutions.”

Part of the heightened appeal for bunkers is the ever-growing value of data. The company Iron Mountain, which now describes itself as an information management firm, got its start offering secure storage in a depleted iron ore mine to banks amid the first wave of nuclear fears in the 1950s. (The television show Bad Robot includes an anarchist attack on its fictional doppelgänger in the hopes of wiping the global financial slate clean.) Iron Mountain now rents out 330,000 square feet of data center space in a former Pennsylvania limestone mine, serving finance, government, and healthcare industries, according to its website. It also stores government employee retirement papers — a practice recently targeted by Elon Musk’s DOGE as outdated.

Safeguarding the physical aspects of data — server racks, power systems, cooling equipment — can help prevent economic disruptions. The market got a taste of what a major crypto crash looks like when FTX filed for bankruptcy and its executives faced fraud charges in 2022. Other crypto firms took a hit, but the financial losses and reputational harm spilled over into banks, venture capital, and fintech as well.

Companies are hard-pressed to protect their data on domestic land. Though nuclear threats have long existed, the increasingly frayed relationships between Western countries and adversaries like Russia and North Korea have renewed bunker interest. European customers fear the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East may soon hit closer to home. Natural disasters have also taken their toll in the US in recent years, exacerbated by the effects of climate change.

A bunker built 200 feet underground with nine-foot-thick concrete walls, as Survival Condo builds them, could provide refuge. The company models its facilities after the Atlas-F missile silos created during the Cold War and designed to withstand a Soviet attack. While the facilities will still face damage from a direct missile hit or one within about 1,000 feet, a warhead dropped further than that will likely leave the structure sound, said Jonas Mureika, a physics professor at Loyola Marymount University.

Some data centers span millions of square feet and would be difficult to place underground, but companies can still store a significant amount of data in the multi-story facilities built below ground. An enterprise server node, about the size of two pizza boxes, can store dozens of terabytes of data. Meanwhile, one terabyte can fit the entire Bitcoin blockchain and leave room to store photos.

The facilities operate independently — generating their own power, filtering their own air, and producing their own water. They draw from multiple energy sources, including diesel tanks, wind turbines, battery banks, and nuclear reactors, meaning that in the event of a disaster, the center could continue operating for at least a few years, Hall said.

But having the safety of bunkers comes with a cost. The cheapest data center, plus executive suite space, that Survival Condo has priced was $45 million, Hall said. It includes 11 floors of living quarters and four floors of data center space — one that would be operational at the start and with three floors for expansion.

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