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.
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.
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.
