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Much of Amazon’s profits derive from sources beyond its e-commerce operations, through its other business ventures. It has purchased other technology companies and products, such as Ring and Twitch, which it has adapted to its central business model. But, its most profitable—and power-building—product is Amazon Web Services (AWS). Managing the world’s largest online retail store required incredible computing power and storage capacity. Amazon extended this expertise to become a third-party provider of web-hosting services to other clients, primarily corporate and government. Major corporate clients, which constitute a very small sampling of all AWS clients, include 3M, Airbnb, Bristol-Myers Squibb, British Petroleum, C-SPAN, Canon, Capital One, Carlyle Group, Comcast, Condé Nast, Dow Jones, Gannett, General Electric, Johnson & Johnson, Kaplan, Kellogg’s, Lexis-Nexis, Lockheed Martin, Lyft, McDonald’s, Monsanto, Netflix, Novartis, Pacific Gas & Electric, Realtor.com, Royal Dutch Shell, Scholastic, Siemens, SoundCloud, Suncorp Bank, Ticketmaster, T-Mobile, and Yelp. AWS also provides financial and banking cloud services for companies and organizations like Aon, Bloomberg, Capital One, FICO, Liberty Mutual, Moody, and PricewaterhouseCoopers. Given this extensive list of clients from corporate America, it is unsurprising that AWS controls nearly half, 47.8 percent as of 2019, of the public-cloud infrastructure, worth over $32 billion.²³ AWS’s cloud dominance comes from cost efficiency and “incessant rollout of new and evolving services”.²⁴

To illustrate some of the consequences resulting from AWS’s massive cloud infrastructure—and primarily how its ability to accumulate “big data” aids in surveillance and corporate domination—consider the AWS contract with the National Football League. The NFL is a multi-billion dollar “not-for-profit” corporation that enjoys incredible popularity in the United States. The NFL uses AWS to gather terabytes of data each week, including via RFID chips placed in footballs. The partnership normalizes sports fans’ interaction with big data, which has a sinister effect upon privacy. Big data involves an incredible asymmetry of power; it benefits those who control and analyze it. However, it also creates an arms race of sorts, as those who actively use it gain an advantage, while those who don’t get “left behind by those who do.”²⁵

In addition to corporate clients, AWS also provides essential infrastructure for various governmental agencies, too. These resources allow state actors to extend their surveillance powers and social control capacity even wider across the world’s population. For example, in 2013 Amazon received a $600 million cloud contract with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). While this contract’s purpose is not completely understood, it takes little imagination to speculate on the resources AWS is providing the world’s largest spying and foreign subversion organization. The CIA has a long, scandalous history of international meddling, disruption, coups, and assassination.²⁶

Another major governmental contract that AWS has bid for is the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) for the U.S. military. Potentially a $10 billion contract, AWS and Microsoft were the two finalist bidders.²⁷ The tech industry and the U.S.’s military-industrial complex have always been close bedfellows, especially in the recent decades of the U.S.’s “forever wars.”²⁸ Unsurprisingly, Amazon PAC’s favourite target of donations are the members of the U.S. House of Representative’s Armed Service Committee, who received over a quarter-million dollars.²⁹ In October 2019, the Pentagon announced Microsoft had won the contract, a decision that Amazon immediately responded to by filing a lawsuit, protesting that this decision was the outcome of U.S. President Donald Trump’s personal animosity against Amazon CEO Bezos, owner of the Washington Post, which has been critical of Trump’s presidency.³⁰

Amazon has explicitly claimed that it supports immigrants. The U.S. government is in the middle of its most recent immigration crackdown, with deportations and detentions of undocumented immigrants on the rise since 2002 (peaking in 2013).³¹ Amazon is not serving as an ally to immigrants, nor is it playing a neutral role. Instead, Immigration Control and Enforcement (ICE) is an AWS client. Amazon provides essential resources in ICE’s detention and deportation regime. The AWS cloud hosts digital immigration case files (including all sorts of relevant familial and residential data) as well as biometric data on 230 million humans. This biometric data includes fingerprints and some face photos. Due to Amazon’s active assistance to ICE, immigrant rights activists, such as Never Again Action, have targeted Amazon. Among other actions, activists and Amazon workers protested on “Amazon Prime Day” (July 15, 2019) in multiple U.S. cities, including San Francisco, Seattle, New York City, and Shakopee, Minnesota, demanding Amazon stop doing business with ICE.³²

As the examples from the CIA, the military, and ICE illustrate, AWS facilitates a state-corporate surveillance nexus.³³ This nexus has incorporated technologies previously unavailable to government, via powerful and reliable computer networks. For disadvantaged groups, this surveillance capitalism not only makes their lives increasingly insecure, but poses a direct threat to their safety and freedom.