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.