With Google, I have a feeling it largely evolved from two other things [that weren't the DoD]. Google never really tried to sell to Defense until JEDI, and did

With Google, I have a feeling it largely evolved from two other things [that weren't the DoD]. Google never really tried to sell to Defense until JEDI, and didn't really have a compelling solution at the time to the need for FedRAMP High requirements. However, what Google did have was a business need to offer GCP in mainland China, and a partnership with Tencent to do so. Additionally, after Thomas Kurian joined, Google also had a willingness to partner with KSA as a tangential part of the overall NEOM investment, but with the hyperscaler providing a dedicated region in Saudia Arabia and in exchange potentially getting heavy commercial workloads from Aramco and other KSA entities. Google already had Sovereign Cloud experience, having built out a data center in Germany (that, among other things, SAP uses for internal development), so it wasn't a huge leap to go from the hoops they had to jump through to offer this combo of stuff all in one package: * Interconnect partnerships (Oracle Bare Metal, Tencent) * Integrated management console (Tencent, Anthos) * Sovereign Cloud services (US Gov't, European governments) Beyond all this, Google has been offering CDN appliances for ages, and space in local POPs for 3rd parties (like Netflix) to install their edge appliances, so it's not like there were any skills gaps on the networking side, either. The real question will be whether the hyerscalers will be able to viably sell these sorts of appliances vs their potential customers just running their own data centers and virtual data centers.