Amazon’s Data Centre Empire Is Much Bigger Than Anyone Realised

For years, Amazon Web Services has tried to cultivate a sense of mystery about the size of its data centre operation. Security concerns, competitive reasons, operational secrecy: pick your excuse.

Now, a fresh set of leaked documents reviewed by Bloomberg and SourceMaterial has blown a hole straight through that fog, revealing a global server empire far bigger than the industry assumed.

AWS is not running a few hundred facilities. It is running more than 900 of them, scattered across at least 50 countries.

The headline sites in Virginia and Oregon are only part of the picture. Amazon has also tucked vast quantities of compute power into hundreds of rented colocation centres, known as colos, which collectively accounted for about a fifth of its available capacity last year.

These colos range from a few racks in a secure room to near-total occupancy of entire complexes in places like Frankfurt and Tokyo. They are the invisible plumbing of the modern web.

According to the report from Bloomberg, there are the big, photogenic data hubs that everyone talks about and then there is the real cloud that no one is allowed to see.

By early 2024, AWS was leaning on more than 440 of these colo facilities, along with more than 220 additional edge sites designed to route traffic quickly into Amazon’s network.

Some edge locations sit inside telecoms hubs in major cities. Others are positioned to let customers move data rapidly between rival clouds and Amazon’s own infrastructure.

The message is clear. Demand for compute is rising at a rate that even Amazon cannot satisfy through owned sites alone.