[zhengyi13]

Disclosure: I work for Google, but nowhere near Cloud, and I have no knowledge of this deal.

Quite apart from the dollar costs and human capital required to build and maintain a DC, there's the lead time required to build the thing, and I'd speculate that that's potentially a significant factor in Snap's decision. Perhaps Snap are looking at e.g. how quickly Pokemon GO scaled their operation, and they're thinking for whatever reason that they might need to do something similar?

[vgt]

It's not just about hardware and data centers. Google cloud offers a global secure high performance sdn, scalability, manageability, things like versioning and deployment tools, code debugging, world class security, and high speed of innovation, all out of the box, or even as intrinsic qualities transparent to customer.

By the time you build your infra (5 years was mentioned), Google would have iterated on their offering and their own network and data centers for 5 years.

(Work on Google cloud)

[patrickg_zill]

There are datacenters for sale, every day of the year, in the USA, that are already operational, lit with fiber, already staffed with the needed people, etc.

Thinking about it more, there must be some other strategic reason behind their decision to go with Google.

[bogomipz]

I totally agree, you can't discount the lead times of things like zoning, permitting, and local bureaucracy. But on the other hand the time frame mentioned is a 5 year period.