The Continuity Infrastructure Initiative has been expanded to include Continuity Research Facilities Bravo and Charlie, bringing all three of the Department’s research facilities under a single infrastructure research program.
WASHINGTON — The Continuity Infrastructure Administration (CIA-DSC) today expanded the Continuity Infrastructure Initiative to include Continuity Research Facility Bravo in the Colorado Front Range and Continuity Research Facility Charlie in interior Alaska. The initiative, established in April 2026 to support the development of Continuity Research Facility Alpha in southern Nevada, now covers all three of the Department’s research facilities.
The expansion follows the commissioning of Archive Level 1 at Facility Bravo in June 2026, the start of pilot vault operations at Facility Charlie in July 2026, and Facility Alpha’s attainment of initial operating capability on 18 August 2026. Bringing the facilities under one program allows CIA-DSC to coordinate research on power, cooling, archival environments and long-duration operation across sites with very different designs and roles.
“Each facility answers a different engineering question,” said the Administrator of the Continuity Infrastructure Administration. “Alpha asks how to run large computational workloads efficiently. Bravo asks how to keep large archives stable underground. Charlie asks what it takes for stored information to survive a century with no one tending it. Treating them as one research program means the answers can inform one another.”
Facility Bravo
Facility Bravo is constructed in a repurposed former hard-rock mine, with working levels at 140 to 190 meters of overburden. Archive Level 1 is held at 15 °C ±1 °C and 35 percent relative humidity and has a capacity of approximately 120 petabytes on tape, together with optical and microfilm vaults. The facility is served by dual independent utility feeds and 72 hours of on-site generation, and uses geothermal-assisted heat rejection. An 8-megawatt compute hall is under fit-out, with completion planned for mid-2027.
Facility Charlie
Facility Charlie is designed so that its archival media remain recoverable for 100 years or more without power. The site was selected for its cold climate, low seismic hazard at the specific location, and isolation. The facility’s structure rests on an engineered foundation and is monitored for thaw; its thermal design does not rely on permafrost. The pilot vault currently holds 1.5 petabytes of active holdings across silica-glass optical storage (pilot), archival microfilm, M-DISC-class optical media and LTO tape. The main vault, with a target capacity of 60 petabytes of long-duration holdings and an offline glass library, is under construction and planned for completion in 2028.
Research under the expanded initiative
Work under the expanded initiative will include long-term monitoring of archival environments at Bravo and Charlie, validation of the media strategy set out in DSC-TR-2026-005, and planning for the energy and compute requirements described in DSC-TR-2026-008. The Directorate of Neural Continuity remains a partner in the initiative, reflecting the facilities’ role in storing research data and hosting computational benchmarks for the Neural Continuity Research Program.
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