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Comment by jmalicki | Hacker News Reader

Just look on satellites for giant buildings with no cars or semi trailers parked in the parking lots.

I wonder if data centers will have to start doubling as automobile junkyards to conceal themselves.

Some Paris data centers are disguised as apartment buildings with the classic Hausmannian facade, and then you open up Google maps and see a ton of AC units stacked on the roof. These aren’t likely major cloud data centers mind you, and the motivation for concealing them has more to do with the city’s aesthetic codes than military defense.

or less aesthetic versions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/33_Thomas_Street#/media/File:A...

Even that isn't a serious data center (on the level of national security concerns). Wall St is run from Mahwah, NJ.

Some data centers are more valuable as targets than others. For example, those comprising us-gov-east-1 and us-gov-west-1 or, god forbid, us-east-1. I don’t expect it is a difficult task to find them and other critical infrastructure for a state, but probably more involved than popping open google maps.

I've always wondered what "us-east-1" is, presumably it's more than just 1 building

That's a region. It's not only many buildings, it's many zones, each of which are many datacenters. A region is just a virtual partition for their services. A zone is a fault domain for their services, and a single zone is met by many datacenters, each of which can have many buildings. Or at the least, I know of at least one datacenter which has multiple buildings, that is within one zone that has multiple datacenters, that is within one region that has multiple zones.

Loudoun county in Virginia, near Washington-Dulles airport. Taxes on data centers built by AWS and other firms provide almost 40% of the county budget.

The US government's security priority should be moving critical us-east-1 services into Cheyenne Mountain.

Probably cheaper to just take over 33 Thomas Street [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/33_Thomas_Street

That is not safe in the same way.

That is way more of a worse target than the existing us-east-1.

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