The hyperscalers are absolutely not colo-ing their general purpose compute at Equinix! A cage for routers and direct connect, maybe some limited Edge CDN/compute at most.
Even where they do lease wholesale space, you'd be hard pushed to find examples of more than one in a single building. If you count them as Microsoft, Google, AWS then I'm not sure I can think of a single example off the top of my head. Only really possible if you start including players like IBM or Oracle in that list.
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).
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”
The best part about adamantly making such a claim is that anybody who knows better also knows better than to break NDA and pull a Warthunder to prove that the CSPs do use colo facilities, so you're not going to get anyone who knows better to disagree with you and say AWS S3 or GCP compute is colo-ed at a specific colo provider.
They consume wholesale space, but not retail Colo for general compute, that's all I'm saying.
Equinx is retail, with only a couple of exceptions, although I know they're trying to grow the wholesale side.