UPDATED 13:44 EDT / NOVEMBER 17 2015

NEWS

Amazon is setting up shop in a classified U.S. intel facility

It appears that the CIA isn’t the only member of the U.S. intelligence community to have taken an interest in Amazon Web Services (AWS). Two years after landing a massive $600 million contract from the spy agency to take over its infrastructure operations, Jeff Bezos’s firm has received an equally unprecedented tax break to set up shop on the premises of the classified Warrenton Training Center in Virginia. The incentives will add up to about $2.7 million over the next three years, but that nonetheless sets a new record for the region that underscores the size of the deal.

Amazon subsidiary Vadata Inc. expects to spend a massive $200 million over that period in addition to the $26.4 million that has already been invested laying down the groundwork for the project, which will follow the same pattern as the CIA contract. The company is building a full-blown data center for the facility that will employ 51 people by the time construction is complete in 2018 and operate independently from the rest of its public cloud platform due to the sensitive nature of the workloads set to be deployed inside. Exactly what those workloads will be is anyone’s guess.

The Warrenton Training Center has served multiple different roles since its establishment in 1951, most notably as a numbers station was used by the CIA to send coded messages to agents abroad. The installation, which is made up of four separate campuses spread out over two counties, also reportedly contains at least one bunker to protect government officials in times of national emergency. But the little information available about its current purpose suggests that the complex has taken on the much less exciting part of a practice ground for new recruits from Department of Defense, the NSA and other national security agencies.

Those who soon be carrying out their secretive work on the same platform – or at least, a close copy – that Netflix Inc. relies upon to stream videos and Comcast Corp. uses to deal with traffic spikes. The fact that the Warrenton Training Center has chosen Amazon over the competition should should provide yet another boost to the marketability of its GovCloud, the part of AWS targeted toward government agencies in less sensitive areas, which is likewise based in the Northwest.

Image via Alexrk2 

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