Why would a company spend $ 1 billion to build a city where no one will live? Because, presumably, a lot of other organizations will pay to test their technology there.

Washington, DC-based telecommunications and defense equipment vendor Pegasus Systems devoted a reported $ 1 billion to build the Center for Innovation, Testing and Evaluation (or CITE for short) in rural New Mexico. The idea is to build the equivalent of a medium-sized city, defined as big enough for about 35,000 people, but with no actual population. That way, companies with potentially dangerous technologies can test their prototypes in an actual urban environment without worrying about inflicting injury or death on innocent bystanders. This will naturally lend itself to researching connected car technology – Wired’s Jeep hack from last year comes to mind – although the project’s website lists several other fields of study, many of which would involve the Internet of Things. The project’s website lists federal labs and university research institutions among the kinds of customers it aims to serve, but Pegasus managing director Robert Brumley told Fortune in October “the facility is open to anybody who wants to test.”  

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