>those are nearly ideal places to locate data centers that are survivable
Yes, because we sure as hell wouldn't want all these these billions of records on random innocent U.S. citizens to die along with us in a nuclear blast, would we?
Actually, given how fragile and ephemeral (by design) most of the rest of digital media is and how much of our culture is tied up in it, no we wouldn't.
It may wind up being the case that the NSA's and similar surveillance architectures become the last great archive of human thought and culture, should something horrible happen. Unless archive.org has some serious Cryptonomicon-like servers hidden deep in a cave somewhere, governments seem to be at least putting more effort into the preservation of digital knowledge than anyone else has.
Yes, because we sure as hell wouldn't want all these these billions of records on random innocent U.S. citizens to die along with us in a nuclear blast, would we?