Amazon Web Services, long celebrated for its planet-sized data centers in rural Virginia and Oregon, turns out to be the tech world’s most successful freeloader, quietly renting server space in more than 900 facilities across over 50 countries, according to documents reviewed by Bloomberg and SourceMaterial.
The company that tells you to return unwanted toaster ovens has been sneakily subletting other people’s server rooms like a digital couch-surfer with excellent credit.
The revelation explains why your Netflix buffered for exactly 15 hours last month—apparently even the cloud can have a bad Wi-Fi day when it’s spread across half the planet’s strip malls and telecom closets.
Investors who thought AWS owned everything in sight just discovered that roughly 20 percent of Amazon’s computing muscle comes from rented racks tucked inside buildings owned by 180 different landlords. Translation: the world’s most profitable division is basically one missed rent check away from having Equinix change the locks.
Energy watchdogs are thrilled, because nothing says “net zero by 2040” like powering Mumbai’s financial district from a natural-gas plant built specifically for your side hustle.
Industry insiders call these rented spaces “colos,” which is short for colocation and long for “please don’t tell anyone we’re here.”
Some AWS outposts are entire skyscraper-sized buildings in Frankfurt and Tokyo. Others are a handful of humming racks locked in a closet next to someone else’s Cisco routers.
Amazon refuses to publish exact addresses, citing security and the universal truth that nobody wins when competitors know where you keep the spare servers.
Early 2024 numbers show AWS leaning on more than 440 colocation sites plus 220 “edge” locations—think of them as the cloud equivalent of keeping an extra router in your cousin’s basement for faster Zoom calls.
An AWS spokesperson calmly explained that the company “balances ownership with flexibility,” which is corporate-speak for “we own the nice houses but still crash on a lot of couches.”
The strategy lets Amazon pop up overnight in new countries without waiting for zoning permits, perfect when every startup suddenly needs 10,000 GPUs to train a chatbot that role-plays as a pirate.
In China, naturally, insists Amazon bring a local joint-venture partner, because nothing builds trust like government-mandated blind dates for data centers.
Meanwhile, electricity consumption maps place some of AWS’s hungriest rented facilities directly under the neon glow of Seoul, Singapore, and Montreal—convenient for speed, less convenient for the day the grid blinks.
Environmental groups point out that all this extra juice is delaying the retirement of fossil-fuel plants. Amazon counters by proudly remaining the largest corporate buyer of renewable energy, proving you can have your carbon offset and burn coal too.
Analysts note Amazon still prefers owning buildings in the U.S., because after 20 years the company finally believes it can run a data center cheaper than the landlord who keeps raising rent to fund his yacht.
Third-party trackers like Baxtel and DC Byte have been guessing AWS has 300–450 buildings for years. Turns out they were counting only the ones with giant Amazon logos on the side.
The rest? Invisible. Like the cloud itself, apparently.
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