Ok. Obviously we're both guessing here as we don't know the exact specs of the datacenter. However, I do have some experience with generic datacenter design and distributed processing systems.

If you have petabytes of data to process, the processing power should be located as physically close to the data as possible. It would make no sense to (for example) have your data stored on the west coast and do your processing on the east coast, because the latencies involved would dramatically increase processing time. If you look at any of the research published by large-scale web companies such as Facebook and Google, you will see that "data locality" is part of the architecture. The closer your processing power is to your data storage, the more efficient your system will be.

I'm still not quite sure what your point is. My initial point was that the NSA has a lot of computing power, some of which could be used in an attempt to decrypt encrypted communications. I'm really not sure what there is to disagree with there.

You are replying and telling me that this datacenter is going to be used purely for storage - I still think this makes no sense. Even if it did, it's irrelevant. The purpose of storing this data is to run analysis on it. If I'm right, the CPUs that do the processing are stored in the same datacenter as the SAN. If you're right, the CPUs are stored in a separate datacenter. Either way, that processing power still exists, which I why I don't think the point is relevant.

They are two distinct problems with their own solutions. So uh, in regards to that particular place, yes.

Do you know of an example where somebody operates two entirely separate datacenters, one for data storage and one for data processing? I'm happy to be proved wrong, but this goes against everything I have been taught with regards to data locality and system efficiency.