This isn't even close to true. You can just go on Google Maps and visually see the literally *hundreds* of wholly-owned and custom built data centers from AWS, MS, and Google. Edge locations (like Cloud CDN) are often in colos, but the main regions compute/storage are not. Most of them are even labeled on Google Maps.
Here's a couple search terms you can just type into Google Maps and see a small fraction of what I mean:
- "Google Data Center Berkeley County"
- "Microsoft Data Center Boydton"
- "GXO council bluffs" (two locations will appear, both are GCP data centers)
- "Google Data Center - Henderson"
- "Microsoft - DB5 Datacentre" (this one is in Dublin, and is huuuuuge)
- "Meta Datacenter Clonee"
- "Google Data Center (New Albany)" (just to the east of this one is a massive Meta data center campus, and to the immediate east of it is a Microsoft data center campus under construction)
And that's just a small sample. There are hundreds of these sites across the US. You're somewhat right that a lot of international locations are colocated in places like Equinix data centers, but even then it's not all of them and varies by country (for example in Dublin they mostly all have their own buildings, not colo). If you know where to look and what the buildings look like, the custom-build and self-owned data centers from the big cloud providers are easy to spot since they all have their own custom design.
While the OP is more wrong than right they aren't completely incorrect.
I'm in Australia.
GCP has 2 regions in Australia, Sydney and Melbourne. The Sydney region is in the Equinox DC. Not sure where the Melbourne one is but it isn't a Google-owned facility.
I agree with you that @anewplace is clearly taking a very US / North America centric view of the world and arrogantly claiming they know everything and telling me I'm some idiot.
Its very telling that @anewplace has gone quiet and not lecturing you in a condescending manner about how you must have "misunderstood".
Yea, you're not the only "insider" here. And you're 100% wrong. Just because you completely misunderstand what those Amazon/MS employees are doing in those buildings doesn't mean that you know what you're talking about.
The big cloud players have the vast majority of their compute and storage hosted out of their own custom built and self-owned data centers. The stuff you see in colos is just the edge locations like Cloudfront and Cloud CDN, or the new-ish offerings like AWS Local Zones (which are a mix between self-owned and colo, depending on how large the local zone is).
Most of this is publicly available by just reading sites like datacenterdynamics.com regularly, btw. No insider knowledge needed.
The Cloud locations aren't just edge locations (scroll down on that page and note most have all APIs supported) and there are a lot more of them than there are Google-owned DCs.
Well those people lied to you then, or more likely there was a misunderstanding, because you can literally just look up the sites I mentioned above and see that you're entirely incorrect.
You don't need to be under NDA to see the hundreds of billions of dollars worth of custom built and self-owned data centers that the big players have.
I am one of those "pay grades many layers higher", and I can personally confirm that each of the locations above is wholly owned and used by Google, and only Google, which already invalidates your claim that "you can count the wholly-owned sites on one hand". Again, this isn't secret info, so I have no issue sharing it.
I'm not trying to make you divulge anything. I don't particularly care who you talk to, or who you are, nor do I care if you take it as a "personal insult" that you might be wrong.
You are right that it would be nuts that multiple senior people would collude to lie to you, which is why it's almost certainly more likely that you are just misunderstanding the information that was provided to you. It's possible to prove that you are incorrect based on publicly available data from multiple different sources. You can keep being stubborn if you want, but that won't make any of your statements correct.
You didn't ask for my advice, but I'll give it anyway: try to be more open to the possibility that you're wrong, especially when evidence that you're wrong is right in front of you. End of story.
You are correct many facilities are owned by the hyperscalers, and they also extensively use colos for hosting entire regions (not only PoPs), specially outside the US. More recently I’d also include Ireland.
I have worked at two cloud providers very close to the netops teams due to my customers, but I have signed NDAs so I won’t go further into it, specially since one of my ex-employers is very touchy about this subject.
It can be true that all the big clouds/cdns/websites are in all the big colos and that big tech also has many owned and operated sites elsewhere.
As one of these big companies. You've got to be in the big colos because that's where you interconnect and peer. You don't want to have a full datacenter installation at one of these places if you can avoid it, because costs are high; but building your own has a long timetable, so it makes sense to put things into colos from time to time and of course, things get entrenched.
I've seen datacenter lists when I worked at Yahoo and Facebook, and it was a mix of small installations at PoPs, larger installations at commercial colo facilities, and owned and operated data centers. Usually new large installations were owned and operated, but it took a long time to move out of commercial colos too. And then there's also whole building leases, from companies that specialize in that. Outside the US, there was more likely hood of being in commercial colo, I think because of logistics, but at large system counts, the dollar efficiency of running it yourself becomes more appealing (assuming land, electricity, and fiber are available)
It is true that every cloud provider uses some edge/colo infra, but it is also not true that most (or even really any relevant) processing happens in those colo/edge locations.
And limiting to just outside the US, both aws and Google have more than ten wholly owned campuses each, and then on top of that, there is edge/colo space.
Here's a couple search terms you can just type into Google Maps and see a small fraction of what I mean:
- "Google Data Center Berkeley County"
- "Microsoft Data Center Boydton"
- "GXO council bluffs" (two locations will appear, both are GCP data centers)
- "Google Data Center - Henderson"
- "Microsoft - DB5 Datacentre" (this one is in Dublin, and is huuuuuge)
- "Meta Datacenter Clonee"
- "Google Data Center (New Albany)" (just to the east of this one is a massive Meta data center campus, and to the immediate east of it is a Microsoft data center campus under construction)
And that's just a small sample. There are hundreds of these sites across the US. You're somewhat right that a lot of international locations are colocated in places like Equinix data centers, but even then it's not all of them and varies by country (for example in Dublin they mostly all have their own buildings, not colo). If you know where to look and what the buildings look like, the custom-build and self-owned data centers from the big cloud providers are easy to spot since they all have their own custom design.