Leaked blueprints of NSA data storage facility reveal 'less capacity than thought' If Kahle's estimations are correct, the facility could hold up to 12,000 petabytes, or 12 exabytes - which is a lot of information, but nowhere near the scale previously reported. Previous estimates would have hypothetically allowed the data centre to hold 24-hour video and audio recordings of every person in the United States for a full year, Forbes notes. The data centre's capacity as calculated by Kahle would only allow the NSA to create "Beyonce-style archives for the 13 million people living in the Los Angeles metro area." While the blueprints are revealing, commentators point out that the NSA has not disclosed any information about the types of storage it plans to install, so any attept to assess the capacity is potentially misleading. For example, a server with built-in storage capacity holds a lot less data than a storage array packed with disk. Moreover, this is just one NSA data centre of many. A recent article in the Washington Post hightlighted that the agency also has facilities in Colorado, Georgia, Hawaii and Texas, as well as Australia and Britain. As industry blog Datacenter Dynamics states, however, the capacity for storing data is not nearly as important as being able to process data and derive valuable information from it, so the NSA's compute capacity and the analytics methods it uses are much more interesting questions.