[beisner]

This seems like the key to me. Yes, if I'm a SaaS company with low bandwidth requirements but have a ton of users domestically, maybe I'll build my own data center (think IBM, or maybe Salesforce). But if I am raising money in the hopes of scaling my user base into the billions, and I need hundreds of millions of people to be able to upload to and download hundreds of megabytes of data to my servers daily, and have those images be instantly available to every user's contacts worldwide, I'll build on top of Google's infrastructure, which was literally designed for these kinds of tasks. Buying the metal is just the tip of the iceberg when. Snap would have to design a high-throughput, globally consistent network of data centers, likely lay their own undersea fiber (as all the cloud providers have done), and assume all the technical risk that comes with building and operating that kind of infrastructure. I think they made the right call on this one.