Creating Cloud WAN to Empower Businesses in the Era of AI Growth
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 we suddenly weren’t just supporting our own apps, but also our customers’ — we focused on greater resiliency, security, and regional reliability.”
The AI era brought new challenges, particularly with the scale of traffic generated by AI-powered applications and model training sent to our network. “We introduced a multi-shard horizontal network architecture to swiftly grow capacity,” Subhasree explains. “Here, each shard is essentially a different instance of the network that exists independently, enabling us to scale within each shard as well as increase the number of shards as demand rises. It’s akin to offering capacity from multiple ISPs, which also ensures redundancy.”
With this new architecture, we increased our WAN bandwidth by 7x between 2020 and 2025. As the network’s architecture evolved, so did its physical scale, with new data centers, cloud regions, and cables expanding reach and capacity.
Customers have already leveraged Cloud WAN in the lead-up to its launch, including Nestlé, the world’s largest food and drink company. They connected with us after deciding to shift to a cloud-based network backbone. Following the deployment of Cloud WAN — utilizing the global Premium Tier network to connect their branches to their cloud ecosystem — Nestlé’s global head of IT platforms reported that their app performance is up 40%, while costs have decreased.
“It’s gratifying to hear those customer stories,” Subhasree reflects. “We were initially building Cloud WAN just for our internal needs, and now we’re expanding it for broader use. With the diversity of applications we’re running and the volume of data, that’s a substantial 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.”
