Inside Finger Lakes' Nuclear Bunker Data Center

Finger Lakes Technologies Group, a family-owned telecom and hosted service provider in upstate New York that also provides co-location and data storage services to its customers. It houses its customers’ hundreds of petabytes of data and thousands of physical documents inside the four-foot thick concrete walls of its 64 above-ground nuclear missile storage bunkers.

For the past 10 years, Finger Lakes Technologies Group has owned and operated the Q area of the Seneca Army Depot in Romulus, New York, an 800-acre section of a Cold War-era munitions storage and disposal facility. The base, which was built in 1941 and subsequently sold to the Seneca County Industrial Development Agency in 2000, is a sprawling 10,500-acre plot of land dotted with aging industrial buildings interspersed between stark fields where rare white deer breed.

Although the US military moved out of the area in 1995, FLTG has given the base a new lease on life by turning it into an ultra-secure and discreet location for its customers’ most critical enterprise data.