[walrus01]

You can be secretive all you want, but it's extremely difficult to hide massive heat exchanging systems and/or generators from aerial/space photography. Particularly at the scale of an AWS-like datacenter.

Building a fully camouflaged datacenter could be done at much greater cost, but you still can't hide its thermal emissions from infrared. Basically every watt hour used in a datacenter environment turns into waste heat ultimately rejected into the atmosphere (except for the 0.000000001% that leaves the facility as photons down a fiber), so if you have N megawatts of waste heat from a rectangular shaped building located on a 300 x 400 meter sized plot of land, it's going to stand out.

[throwaway894345]

Geothermal exists, but you would have to take care to design accordingly and even then there are plenty of other ways for a state actor to locate you. It probably doesn’t make much sense to spend money trying to hide from state actors; it’s probably better to (1) avoid conflict prone areas to the extent possible and (2) make it expensive for an attacker to shut you down (use more smaller data centers within a sensitive region, put some of them underground, etc) or (3) accept the risk of data center disruption.

[s1mplicissimus]

Wouldn't it be possible to pipe away the heat to the next city and use it as heating there? That way the heat emissions wouldn't be as noticeable

[AngryData]

Possibly but it is a bigger and more obvious project than just the data center itself, would cost an ass ton of money, and would mean the cooling line itself is a standalone target to take the data center down.

[ceejayoz]

A project of that size is gonna be even harder to conceal.

[jmalicki]

> except for the 0.000000001% that leaves the facility as photons down a fiber

Realistically you're getting photons returned too.

[brianwawok]

Hey my EV gets lighter at empty battery vs full.