Per that link: I think there's an interesting question about whether a nefarious actor who's infiltrated a cloud provider with physical access to machines that are running signed operating systems, with signed binaries, with TDX remote attestation, and with hardware supply chain verification, has the ability to break the privacy guarantees of a tenant with Apple's sophistication.

Certainly, one could tamper with the hardware, but could one do it in a way that wouldn't get that machine immediately flagged, removed from the routing pool, and told to wipe its memory immediately, by a watchtower (perhaps even the routing layer itself) that runs in a separate secure Apple datacenter?

That’s not so special, though? There’s a difference between Google infra running Google services.

Versus any F500 company running their services on GCP.

It’s a bit whacky to think about because Apple will operate Google owned software on GCP. But it should be sandboxed just the same.

I’m not making a normative privacy argument here. Just pointing out that this is cloud business as usual. Perhaps it’s interesting Apple is doing it, but basically everything else is already using either AWS or GCP at this point.

Google Cloud, but, the way I read it, not Google’s AI offerings. They, basically, hire Google servers to run their software on it.

They also (claim to) ensure those servers run only software they have approved to run on it.

(Part of their software are models derived from Google Gemini, but that’s orthogonal to this)

They are not _only_ using Google Cloud. They continue to build and invest in their own datacenters. It's not a binary choice.

That is news — I guess not very surprising that they'd need more data centres than before.

But again there is no Apple-to-Google transfer in the inference in the sense of the comment I was originally replying to (I am not suggesting you're implying otherwise, obviously)

But I stand happily corrected where I said they aren't in the picture at all.

That is an interesting press release because it outlines what they would have had to do with any data centre they were outsourcing to.

iCloud already uses Google Cloud, so that still doesn't change the operational boundaries of where data goes

I hope they are still using PCC hardware rather than running private data through third-party servers.