The IP address owned by Amazon alone has an asset value of more than 250 billion yen

by thierry ehrmann

Of the IP addresses that can be called addresses on the Internet, the problem of IP address exhaustion is imminent, as the IPv4 address allocation is exhausted . Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon's cloud computing service, is buying up such a shortage of IPv4 addresses in large quantities, said Andree Toonk , the founder and engineer of the Internet monitoring service ` ` BGPmon.net ''. I am explaining.

AWS and their Billions in IPv4 addresses
https://toonk.io/aws-and-their-billions-in-ipv4-addresses/index.html

In 2017, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced that it would move at least 8 million IPv4 addresses to AWS out of the allocated but unused 18.0.0.8 / 8 blocks as it transitioned from IPv4 to IPv6. In 2018, 3.0.0.0/8 and 3.123.0.0/8, which are 1/256 of the IPv4 address space, will move from General Electric to Amazon.com. In addition, it turns out that in 2019, Amateur Radio Digital Communications (ARDC) sold 44.192.0.0/10 for $ 108 million.

Price of 4 million IP addresses purchased by Amazon in 2019 revealed by publication of financial report --GIGAZINE

In addition, Mr. Toonk pointed out that the IPv4 address market has been active in recent years, so it is possible to buy IPv4 addresses just because AWS is not known and have a huge amount of IPv4 addresses other than the above. doing.

AWS publishes JSON that lists the IPv4 addresses it owns, but Toonk thought that this was not all, and combined it with the data of the Internet registry ARIN , APNIC , RIPE , and AWS as far as it can be confirmed. I made a list of all IPv4 addresses owned by and published it on GitHub.

AWS prefixes · GitHub
https://gist.github.com/atoonk/b749305012ae5b86bacba9b01160df9f

According to Toonk, there are over 100 million IPv4 addresses on the list. The average price of IPv4 addresses, which are becoming depleted, has risen in the last few years, and the average price in recent years is about $ 25 (about 2600 yen) per IPv4 address, calculated from the site for buying and selling IPv4 addresses. In other words, the IPv4 address owned by Amazon has a total asset value of about 2.5 billion dollars (about 260 billion yen). However, since the price of an IPv4 address is of course the market price, the asset value fluctuates according to supply and demand.

'It's clear that AWS is working hard behind the scenes,' Toonk said. 'According to published data, the company has assigned about 53 million IPv4 addresses to existing AWS services, which means up to 4700. That means there are still 10,000 IPv4 addresses left and available for future allocations. Sounds good! In addition, AWS will continue to procure IPv4 addresses. The IPv4 address market is still hot. '.