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Comment by Kalium | Hacker News Reader

Every contract with a national government buying whole data centers for cloud services is a major one with big numbers attached. This is not a small amount of money and the backlash to date has yet to be impactful.

If you want to be a major cloud player - and Google does - you need to be willing to do what other major cloud players do and sell to national governments. AWS, Oracle, and other hyperscalers all do.

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Is there any other state Google made this kind of work?

After a brief bit of research, Google also works extensively with US and UK governments. I would expect there's also quite a list of other rich-world governments that Google sells cloud services to.

Israel's only really special here in that it's far more objectionable to many people. To your other point, corrupt African countries are generally not stumping up billions of dollars for cloud computing, even if we assume Google would want to do business there.

There's actually a not particularly visible - but very real - sector of large companies that hire hyperscalers to build them private clouds. Those deals wind up looking very similar to Project Nimbus. Examples:

* https://www.oracle.com/cloud/cloud-at-customer/dedicated-reg... * https://aws.amazon.com/dedicatedlocalzones/

There's a difference between "selling to governments" and "selling to governments who are actively committing genocide".

Certainly... it's just that anyone with any real knowledge/power knows that isn't happening (see the leaders of basically every consequential democracy from Germany to USA, even Ukraine).

"Everybody in the US's alliance structure agrees that the US's top Middle-East ally is behaving completely appropriately, which is strong evidence that they are. I am very smart."

I'm not appealing to authority, I'm stating a fact. But even if I were, there certainly isn't a better 'alliance structure' to appeal to. In any case, it's a good thing your opinion on the matter is essentially meaningless (as is mine) which was the only point I was really making.

What I'm disagreeing with in your statement is the conflation of "real knowledge" with "power." It is true that all the most powerful governments in the West have taken roughly the same line on the charge of genocide in Gaza, but it is not at all the case that everyone with "real knowledge" has agreed with them.

As I said, there certainly isn't a better 'alliance structure' to appeal to. To suggest otherwise is to suggest conspiracy and I'll have none of that

Correct. You shouldn't decide whether there's a genocide going on in Gaza by consulting official statements from interested governments. You should decide based on independent human rights researchers, international law scholars, journalists, and so on. Opinion on the subject among these people is very much split.

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