The controversial publisher WikiLeaks has released what it calls a “highly confidential internal document” from the cloud computing provider Amazon Web Services (AWS). The document is from late 2015, and lists the addresses and some operational details of more than 100 AWS data centers spread across 15 cities in nine countries.

According to the “Amazon Atlas” document, Amazon operates in 38 facilities in Northern Virginia, eight in San Francisco, eight in Seattle, and seven in Oregon. In Europe it has seven data centers in Dublin, Ireland, four in Germany, and three in Luxembourg. In the Asia-Pacific region it has 12 data centers in Japan, nine in China, six in Singapore, and eight in Australia. It also has six sites in Brazil.

 

“Amazon, which is the largest cloud provider, is notoriously secretive about the precise locations of its data centers,” according to WikiLeaks. “While a few are publicly tied to Amazon, this is the exception rather than the norm. More often, Amazon operates out of data centers owned by other companies with little indication that Amazon itself is based there too.”

WikiLeaks says that to maintain secrecy, Amazon often runs data centers under less-identifiable subsidiaries such as VaData, and in some cases Amazon uses pseudonyms to obscure its presence.

The Atlas document lists the following colocation and wholesale data center partners: Equinix, CyrusOne, Digital Fortress, Hitachi, Terremark, KVH, KDDI, Keppel, Tata Communications, Colt, Global Switch, iseek-KDC, NextDC, and Ascenty (now owned by Digital Realty).

Some of this information has undoubtedly changed since the Atlas document was published in 2015. Amazon did not immediately reply to a request for comment for this story.

JEDI Looms

The news comes as major cloud providers including AWS, Microsoft, and IBM are competing for a $10 billion, 10-year cloud contract from the U.S. Department of Defense. Just this week Microsoft bolstered its Azure cloud in a move that could help it win the coveted Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract.

IBM filed a protest against the JEDI cloud computing contract process, saying it’s flawed to lock the military into a single cloud provider for 10 years. And IBM also complained that JEDI was “a bad use of taxpayer dollars and was written with just one company in mind.” It’s not clear whether IBM was referring to AWS or Microsoft, both of whom already do a lot of cloud business for the U.S. government.

Oracle also filed a protest against the JEDI contract process.

Meanwhile, Google this week said it would not bid for the JEDI contract because the work may not align the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) principles.

The disclosure of its data center locations will undoubtedly upset Amazon and could affect its bid for the JEDI contract. For obvious security reasons the Department of Defense would probably prefer to keep private the locations of the data centers it uses.