AWS does not publicize all of their stuff, true, but they have partner documentation, their partners are proud to be vendors to Amazon and will advertise, and there are old unlisted PDFs on the Internet. Besides, Amazon has thousands of employees and contractors and their families. This kind of thing is within reach of any human being with sufficient interest.
I wonder if data centers will have to start doubling as automobile junkyards to conceal themselves.
That is way more of a worse target than the existing us-east-1.
Building a fully camouflaged datacenter could be done at much greater cost, but you still can't hide its thermal emissions from infrared. Basically every watt hour used in a datacenter environment turns into waste heat ultimately rejected into the atmosphere (except for the 0.000000001% that leaves the facility as photons down a fiber), so if you have N megawatts of waste heat from a rectangular shaped building located on a 300 x 400 meter sized plot of land, it's going to stand out.
Realistically you're getting photons returned too.
More tech-y approach - AI (or even actual security guards) monitor the video cameras and once there are incoming drones, several MW of power can be redirected into those datacenter's large satellite dishes (more precisely - into very simple microwave generators installed on the dishes) and the dishes turned toward the incoming drones - the drones will get cooked in seconds, add the kitchen microwave sound effect.
> A few cheap drones can ...
It is temporary. The race is only starting. Soon you will have to have a hive of highly intelligent autonomous drones to have even slightest chance to make through a hive of highly intelligent autonomous interceptors, etc.
The government based defense departments are very slow and expensive though, while the extremely valuable targets like the datacenters belong to the transnationals and located across the world (and more and more in space). Thus the transnationals would have to take care of the defense of their assets themselves (or outsource it to other transnationals, like say imagine AWS providing air-defense-as-a-service), more efficiently and agile than the government defense departments. If you take a look at Palantir Karp's book "Technological Republic" you can read that between the lines there too.
So, it would generally be more effective to hit the actual datacenter than try to cut the power.
It's much more effective to just go through satellite imagery and land title records.
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=0.01+ms+at+speed+of+lig...
Not exactly, but you can uncover cloud providers like Google and Azure, who forget to tell you, their "availability zones" are in the same data center ;-)
For example Lakeside Technology Center in Chicago
Or Telehouse in London
While probably not a state agent, I've personally done online interviews with some people that were clearly lying about everything and trying to feel out details about the company. People claiming to live in our country and being citizens but having little ability with the language, saying they would love to come to our city but it's a bit far, saying they graduated from a major university but being unable to describe anything about the town (with their resume mentioning graduating from a different university, and their LinkedIn a different university from either), random people moving around and arguing in the background, all their work was with random crypto businesses that shut down within months. I had to stop my coworkers from saying too much. I had to convince them why hiring that person for remote work and giving them access to our servers was a bad idea. There are without a doubt companies giving similar people physical access to their hardware. And there are undoubtedly people who practice interviewing to better deceive companies.