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.

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.

Google lists their dc locations publicly: https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/locations/

Aws doesn't list the campuses as publicly, but https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/regio... shows the AZ vs edge deployments and any situation with multiple AZs is going to have buildings, not floors operated by Amazon.

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.