This project began with a simple, literal premise: Use street view mapping software to “visit” the massive data center complexes powering cloud computing and the rise of AI, and take screenshots of clouds in the sky overhead. In essence: pictures of real clouds about the infrastructure of what we euphemistically call the cloud.
However, I soon encountered my first hurdle: corporations are extremely secretive about the exact locations of their data centers. Big reasons they would rather not tell include security, real estate prices, competition with other companies, and negotiating government incentives.
I decided to start my detective work on the cloud provider with the biggest market share: Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Fortunately, it turned out that in 2018, WikiLeaks released a 2015 internal list of Amazon’s data center locations at the time, providing a starting point—though that list is now ten years old, and data centers are proliferating rapidly in 2025 due to anticipated commercial demand for AI processing power.
In releasing the locations list, the editors at WikiLeaks wrote in part:
Today, 11 October 2018, WikiLeaks publishes a "Highly Confidential" internal document from the cloud computing provider Amazon. The document from late 2015 lists the addresses and some operational details of over one hundred data centers spread across fifteen cities in nine countries. To accompany this document, WikiLeaks also created a map showing where Amazon’s data centers are located.
Amazon, which is the largest cloud provider, is notoriously secretive about the precise locations of its data centers. 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 or runs its own data centers under less-identifiable subsidiaries…
While one of the benefits of the cloud is the potential to increase reliability through geographic distribution of computing resources, cloud infrastructure is remarkably centralised in terms of legal control. Just a few companies and their subsidiaries run the majority of cloud computing infrastructure around the world. Of these, Amazon is the largest by far, with recent market research showing that Amazon accounts for 34% of the cloud infrastructure services market.
Until now, this cloud infrastructure controlled by Amazon was largely hidden, with only the general geographic regions of the data centers publicised. While Amazon’s cloud is comprised of physical locations, indications of the existence of these places are primarily buried in government records or made visible only when cloud infrastructure fails due to natural disasters or other problems in the physical world.
In the process of dispelling the mystery around the locations of Amazon’s data centers, WikiLeaks also turned this document into a puzzle game, the Quest of Random Clues. The goal of this game was to encourage people to research these data centers in a fun and intriguing way, while highlighting related issues such as contracts with the intelligence community, Amazon’s complex corporate structures, and the physicality of the cloud.