The cleared department is handled the same way as in the military in terms of security. Amazon has SCIF's etc. So unless a disgruntled employee steps forward who doesn't care about there life, I imagine its easily contained (and symptoms of an employee being disgruntled are highly monitored when they hold a clearance)

I’m thinking about the non cleared data center folk, the sys admins and developers who use the servers for their applications.

How do a bunch of Supermicro servers vanish wintout anyone noticing? I’d expect quite a few people would be involved that do not have any clearances. Apple is known for their secrecy but a few other companies named are not.

At the scale their datacenter are, they must be replacing a full rack of servers every single day, just to follow a standard 3 years depreciation policy.

Servers practically vanish every single day. Add a few more supermicro and it's not even noticeable. Business as usual.

Maybe they didn't remove them.

I knew a dozen people working on Amazon Go for like 4 years before it launched. Not one person leaked, even internally, what the hell they were building. Just that it was awesome and I should come join their team.

Somehow, Amazon is really good at keeping secrets.

1) Everybody involved has agreed to keep secrets.

2) You compartmentalize everyone so nobody has the complete picture.

If it is classified and a cleared employee at Amazon/Apple/etc. blabbled there would be life altering consequences for them.

Then there will be? As someone apparently/allegedly blabbed to Bloomberg?

I say again to Bloomberg: picture (x-Ray) or it didn't happen.

Very easily, that's how https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Stamos#Yahoo!

Except they didn't keep it wrapped, did they? And people all the way to the CEO knew about it.

Point being it started with the CEO.. At what point do you suspect the publicist of all people was clued in? Absolutely never.