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If I understand this correctly, he’s not talking about a public cloud, but rather about Google-developed solutions for an air-gapped internal platform. Google have had several public job listings for “sovereign cloud” teams.

There are a few other companies that offer something similar in the enterprise space (e.g. VMware/Broadcom for the platform part), and a lot of them are from the US as well.

Would it be better to buy European? Certainly from an autonomy point of view. But that’s not the only factor in purchasing decisions and Google probably still have better access to talent.

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> Would it be better to buy European? Certainly from an autonomy point of view. But that’s not the only factor in purchasing decisions and Google probably still have better access to talent.

I also think there was no European solution available with the same feature set. You can't buy something that doesn't exist.

It's arguable that the feature-set is obtuse and overrated. After all, no single country's government needs to scale as much as Google, and serve as many customers nearly as much. There are nice things about Google's infra on the networking side, but a lot of it like fancy encapsulations and optically reconfigurable switching only matters for public clouds. For private clouds, the workloads simply do not require elasticity like that. When it comes to applications, like distributed filesystems, object stores, and databases, all of it is pretty much open source commodity these days.

Don't forget, Google is now selling TPU's, for one, to third-party operators.

Still useless. If it updates its Google-provided software or is serviced by Google employees, they must comply and do whatever it takes to get the data when the US government asks.

You cannot trust the fox to stay out of coop, you cannot trust the dog to keep out of bowl, and you cannot trust the Americans to leave out clandestine signals collection.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-24690055

What Merz is proposing would make the above child's play.

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