The network they’ll use has evolved over the decades to meet dramatic shifts in technology.
“In the early days, we built the network for applications like Search and Ads, and our focus was reliability, scale and efficiency,” Subhasree says. “When we acquired YouTube and moved into streaming, we adapted the network to ensure we delivered high-quality video. With the rise of cloud computing and Google Cloud — when suddenly we weren’t just supporting our own apps, but our customers’ — we focused on greater resiliency, security and regional reliability.”
The AI era brought new challenges, starting with the scale of traffic AI-powered apps and model training sends to our network. “We introduced a multi-shard horizontal network architecture to swiftly grow capacity,” Subhasree says. “Here, each shard is essentially a different instance of the network that exists independently, and we can scale the network within each shard as well as increase the number of shards as demand increases. It’s like we’re offering capacity from multiple ISPs, which ensures redundancy, too.”
With this new architecture, we increased our WAN bandwidth by 7x between 2020 and 2025. And as the network’s architecture evolved, so too did its physical scale, with new data centers, cloud regions and cables creating greater reach and capacity.
Customers have already been using Cloud WAN in the lead up to launch, including Nestlé, the world’s largest food and drink company. They connected with Google after deciding to shift to a cloud-based network backbone. Following the deployment of Cloud WAN, including using the global Premium Tier network to connect their branches to their cloud ecosystem, Nestlé’s global head of IT platforms shared that their app performance is up 40% — and costs are down.
“It’s gratifying to hear those customer stories,” Subhasree says. “We were initially building Cloud WAN just for Google and now we’re building it for everyone. With the diversity of applications we’re running and the volume of data, that’s a huge responsibility — it’s, dare I say, uncomfortably exciting. But we’ve put an incredible amount of work into this network, and we’re ready to help the world connect.”