Not a Google employee. Last I recall, the only place in Africa that stood to benefit from local infrastructure was South Africa, yet because of how geographically isolated it was from the next nearest hop, latency and packet loss were just intolerable. The latter should be solvable, though the former was dependent on closer neighbors. Same goes for Australia, more or less. I’m curious why there isn’t more demand in Nigeria or Kenya though!

They have a cloud presence in Sydney for example. They just presumably don’t own the DC because it’s too small to be worth building their own

Nobody lives there. Ten times more people live in Indonesia.