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Maybe leasing wholesale space shouldn’t be considered colocation, but GCP absolutely does this and the Slough datacenter was a real example.

I can’t dig up the source atm but IIRC some Equinix website was bragging about it (and it wasn’t just about direct connect to GCP).

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Google doesn't put GCP compute inside Equinx Slough. I could perhaps believe if they have a cage of routers and perhaps even CDN boxes/Edge, but no general cloud compute.

Google and AWS will put routers inside Equinx Slough sure, but that's literally written on the tin, and the only way a carrier hotel could work.

Then why do they obfuscate the location of their servers? If they were all in Google datacenters, why not let me see where my VM is?

Security reasons, I presume? Otherwise it would be trivial for an adversary to map out their resources by sampling VM rentals over a moderate time-period.

I’m very naive on the subject here - what advantage would this give someone?

The knowledge of blast radii.

Gives whole new meaning to “reverse engineering”

Well, the alternative name for it is "backwards engineering" for a reason.

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