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.
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.
Hell, you can literally just look at their public websites: https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/locations/
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.