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Google says it's the cleanest cloud. Signs deal with Saudi oil for new region

51 points by samizdis 6y ago

TheAdamist 6y ago
Grossly misleading headline, "and announced a new cloud region in Saudi Arabia that will be resold by an arm of state-owned oil and gas company Saudi Aramco.". They won't be powered by saudi oil, just resold by them, however that works.
- Jedd 6y ago
  Unless the title's changed substantially in the past half hour, 'signs deal with' doesn't imply 'powered by'. Perhaps we're referring to subtitles on El Reg's web site -- but theregister.co.uk is renowned for (take your pick) biting satire / alluring alliteration / page-3 quality innuendo.
- tedk-42 6y ago
  Yeah that's how I read the article. It seems like Saudi Arabia is continuing to diversify their economy outside of oil and gas. Offering cloud services in the region provides a way in which they can continue to create value outside oil and gas. AWS have a datacenter in Bahrain and Azure is in the UAE so it's logical Google would choose an economically significant country in the region
- samizdis 6y ago
  I see your point. I was trying to preserve some of the tone from The Register, which was saying that this looks hypocritical, but space is limited. I could take a leaf out of Bloomberg's book and swap out "Saudi oil" for Aramco. (Or anyone else leap in with suggestions, or perhaps a mod could effect a well-judged edit?) Anyhow, the Bloomberg article is worth reading; tone is less snarky, as you'd expect, but it does reference similar aspects that seem like contradictions: Google’s Aramco Deal Risks Irking Staff Over Oil, Politics https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-21/google-brings-its-cloud-business-to-saudi-arabia-with-aramco https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-21/google-br...
spondyl 6y ago
This somewhat reminds me of an old employer who had both proclaimed their belief in offsetting carbon emissions while also having a partnership in place with BP, I believe it was, where you could get a discount off your SaaS subscription by buying fuel Both were publically announced campaigns, live and overlapping during the same time periods and probably still exist online right now The funniest bit was someone challenged this cognitive dissonance internally and a PR person responded saying "We understand it can be hard for some businesses to meaningfully make change towards becoming carbon neutral" I think it's hard for any company to do something when it's literally at odds with their entire business model and reason for existence :)
- hobby-coder-guy 6y ago
  What company are you talking about?
- fakedang 6y ago
  Nearly all of the "ecologically focused ETFs" and Blackrock funds (where Larry Fink made a huge hullabaloo of investing in only non-polluting companies) are invested in Aramco, Exxon, Chevron, etc.
NiceWayToDoIT 6y ago
Can someone explain me, few years ago Google was at least in my mind a huge company that was doing cool things. They were trying thing no one ever tried... Nowadays, each time I see news on first page of HN about Google it is some kind of issue/trouble/problem/villainy... is it my filter broken, am I bias, has Google turn bad, what is going on?
- izacus 6y ago
  HN has decided that Google is evil so it upvotes every critical article about it. Meanwhile some news outlets have focused on Google and are digging for clickbait news to drive more traffic (case in point is this very article which has a clickbait misleading title). In reality Google is just a corpo, about the same as others. They do cool things, they do shitty things and they won't save the world just like Oracle, Apple, IBM, Facebook or General Motors won't. The perception is driven by choosing what to write about by the media you're reading.
- rusticpenn 6y ago
  Company is a representation of its people. The structure of companies always bring money oriented people to the top. The products are represented by the financial ratios.
- washadjeffmad 6y ago
  This is the fact-lite timeline version, but the Google founders all but stepped away as figureheads, "Don't Be Evil" was removed as the company motto, and we discovered through various leaks that Google has, in fact, been doing evil by contributing to recognition technology used in authoritarian nationstates, granted government backdoors to its customer data, providing censored versions of the internet to human rights-limited markets, selling data trained from captchas to the DoD for use in drone strikes, becoming a shameless monopoly and flouting antitrust laws worldwide, among more that we likely haven't discovered. They got big enough to court entire nations and militaries, and so they did. It's the IBM story set in the cloud.
- mav3rick 6y ago
  Many HNers resent Google as they couldn't crack it and other FAANGs. Tomorrow if Sundar eats at a McDonalds, it will be posted here and upvoted with flame bait comments.

51 points by samizdis 6y ago

Grossly misleading headline, "and announced a new cloud region in Saudi Arabia that will be resold by an arm of state-owned oil and gas company Saudi Aramco.". They won't be powered by saudi oil, just resold by them, however that works.

Jedd 6y ago
Unless the title's changed substantially in the past half hour, 'signs deal with' doesn't imply 'powered by'. Perhaps we're referring to subtitles on El Reg's web site -- but theregister.co.uk is renowned for (take your pick) biting satire / alluring alliteration / page-3 quality innuendo.
tedk-42 6y ago
Yeah that's how I read the article. It seems like Saudi Arabia is continuing to diversify their economy outside of oil and gas. Offering cloud services in the region provides a way in which they can continue to create value outside oil and gas. AWS have a datacenter in Bahrain and Azure is in the UAE so it's logical Google would choose an economically significant country in the region
samizdis 6y ago
I see your point. I was trying to preserve some of the tone from The Register, which was saying that this looks hypocritical, but space is limited. I could take a leaf out of Bloomberg's book and swap out "Saudi oil" for Aramco. (Or anyone else leap in with suggestions, or perhaps a mod could effect a well-judged edit?) Anyhow, the Bloomberg article is worth reading; tone is less snarky, as you'd expect, but it does reference similar aspects that seem like contradictions: Google’s Aramco Deal Risks Irking Staff Over Oil, Politics https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-21/google-brings-its-cloud-business-to-saudi-arabia-with-aramco https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-21/google-br...

spondyl 6y ago

This somewhat reminds me of an old employer who had both proclaimed their belief in offsetting carbon emissions while also having a partnership in place with BP, I believe it was, where you could get a discount off your SaaS subscription by buying fuel Both were publically announced campaigns, live and overlapping during the same time periods and probably still exist online right now The funniest bit was someone challenged this cognitive dissonance internally and a PR person responded saying "We understand it can be hard for some businesses to meaningfully make change towards becoming carbon neutral" I think it's hard for any company to do something when it's literally at odds with their entire business model and reason for existence :)

hobby-coder-guy 6y ago
What company are you talking about?
fakedang 6y ago
Nearly all of the "ecologically focused ETFs" and Blackrock funds (where Larry Fink made a huge hullabaloo of investing in only non-polluting companies) are invested in Aramco, Exxon, Chevron, etc.

NiceWayToDoIT 6y ago

Can someone explain me, few years ago Google was at least in my mind a huge company that was doing cool things. They were trying thing no one ever tried... Nowadays, each time I see news on first page of HN about Google it is some kind of issue/trouble/problem/villainy... is it my filter broken, am I bias, has Google turn bad, what is going on?

izacus 6y ago
HN has decided that Google is evil so it upvotes every critical article about it. Meanwhile some news outlets have focused on Google and are digging for clickbait news to drive more traffic (case in point is this very article which has a clickbait misleading title). In reality Google is just a corpo, about the same as others. They do cool things, they do shitty things and they won't save the world just like Oracle, Apple, IBM, Facebook or General Motors won't. The perception is driven by choosing what to write about by the media you're reading.
rusticpenn 6y ago
Company is a representation of its people. The structure of companies always bring money oriented people to the top. The products are represented by the financial ratios.
washadjeffmad 6y ago
This is the fact-lite timeline version, but the Google founders all but stepped away as figureheads, "Don't Be Evil" was removed as the company motto, and we discovered through various leaks that Google has, in fact, been doing evil by contributing to recognition technology used in authoritarian nationstates, granted government backdoors to its customer data, providing censored versions of the internet to human rights-limited markets, selling data trained from captchas to the DoD for use in drone strikes, becoming a shameless monopoly and flouting antitrust laws worldwide, among more that we likely haven't discovered. They got big enough to court entire nations and militaries, and so they did. It's the IBM story set in the cloud.
mav3rick 6y ago
Many HNers resent Google as they couldn't crack it and other FAANGs. Tomorrow if Sundar eats at a McDonalds, it will be posted here and upvoted with flame bait comments.