Why Amazon's data centers are in spy country (2016)
There is no mystery here. The "spy country" link is more of a coincidence; after all, the Internet was a DARPA project, and Northern Virginia is where a lot of defense and government stuff is.<p>When DARPA Internet was turned over to the public, one of the largest interconnect points was at 8100 Boone Blvd (Tysons Corner), known as MAE East [1]. Once upon a time I had access to it, as did countless other people running small ISPs around the area and renting rack space in that building. But the building (it's actually three buildings, and the MAE gigabit switch [2] was in the basement across the street) was not really suitable for any kind of a data center, though above.net did manage to convert the whole level of a parking garage into one, albeit with very low ceilings.<p>Pretty soon everyone figured out that by Dulles airport rent is way cheaper, you can build from scratch, there is plenty of electricity and water and connectivity is cheap, and AOL was out that way too.<p>That's pretty much the story. Amazon barely existed then. There used to be a nice bookstore nearby called "Computer Literacy Bookshop", which eventually went all online and later got acquired by Amazon or B&N, can't remember...<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAE-East" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAE-East</a>
[2] <a href="http://www.fairfaxunderground.com/forum/file.php?2,file=9012,filename=mae-east-in-the-parking-garage.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://www.fairfaxunderground.com/forum/file.php?2,file=9012...</a>