This stalemate lasted until the start of the US Civil War. However, in the 1850s no Congressman from a northern state would have voted for a southerly railroad route to aid the Confederacy's slave-based economy, and no Congressman from the south would have voted for a northerly route. Why was the first transcontinental railroad built along the 41st parallel from Council Bluffs, Iowa to Sacramento, California? Starting in 1853, the United States conducted Pacific surveys to map the best transcontinental route for a railway: along the 47th parallel, 39th parallel, 35th parallel and 32nd parallel. In 1859 the US Secretary of War, Jefferson Davis, strongly favored the southerly railroad route from New Orleans to San Diego: it was shorter, had no major mountains to traverse, and had lower operational costs due to lack of snowfall to clear from the tracks. Their single strip of land completely bisects the United States, as shown by the original railway survey completed in 1864: If you’re a telecommunication company wishing to deploy new fiber across the United States, you only need to negotiate with a single entity: the Union Pacific railroad. Why did all of these telecommunication companies choose to locate their fiber cabling along this specific route across the United States? It’s because each of these cables are buried in the contiguous 200-foot right-of-way alongside the first transcontinental railroad, completed in 1869. The United States government granted these land rights to the Union Pacific railroad via the Pacific Railway Act of 1862. This fiber optic infrastructure provides the datacenters with unprecedented access to the absolute highest bandwidth in a virtuous cycle of investment: more datacenters drive more traffic, which drives more fiber optic cables, which drives more datacenters. What is so special about the 41st parallel that would make so many different companies invest billions of dollars to build datacenters in these cities? It’s because the vast bulk of east/west data traffic in the United States passes through each of these cities via the largest collection of fiber optic cables from the highest diversity of telecommunication companies: AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Level 3, Zayo, Fibertech, Windstream and others. The US National Security Agency operates the "Bumblehive" massive intelligence data repository for their datacenter in Salt Lake City, Utah.This is one of the fastest supercomputers in the world. The National Center for Atmospheric Research has deployed a 1.5 petaflop supercomputer in Cheyenne, Wyoming.This is in addition to their new datacenter investments in Salt Lake City. Google is investing $1 billion in their datacenter outside of Omaha, Nebraska.Facebook is building their latest 500,000 square foot datacenter on 146 acres in Omaha, Nebraska.Apple has invested $1.35 billion in their latest datacenter in Des Moines, Iowa.And a $750 million datacenter in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Microsoft has invested $3.5 billion in one of the world’s largest datacenters located in Des Moines, Iowa.Each of these companies are investing billions of dollars into these four cities:
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