AWS and Google Cloud compete for nearly every enterprise workload on the planet. In April, they opened a private, encrypted connection directly between their networks anyway, one enterprises can now provision from a console in minutes instead of negotiating physical circuits for months.
From Preview to General Availability in Five Months
AWS and Google Cloud jointly announced the collaboration on December 8, 2025, pairing AWS Interconnect’s multicloud capability with Google Cloud’s Cross-Cloud Interconnect and introducing an open specification for network interoperability between the two platforms. AWS Interconnect reached general availability on April 29, 2026, covering multicloud connections to other providers as well as last-mile connections from on-premises locations into AWS.
The service lets customers provision private Layer 3 connections between AWS and Google Cloud virtual networks through the AWS Direct Connect console or API, a process that previously required weeks or months of manual circuit coordination between provider teams. Traffic runs over a private network secured with MACsec encryption and never touches the public internet. AWS and Google Cloud plan to add support for Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud later in 2026, extending the same model across the four largest cloud providers.
AWS prices the service at flat hourly rates that vary by bandwidth and region pair. Every account has received one free 500 Mbps local interconnect per region since May 2026, and last-mile bandwidth options range from 1 Gbps to 100 Gbps under a 99.99% service level agreement. AWS vice president of network services Robert Kennedy called the collaboration “a fundamental shift in multicloud connectivity.” Salesforce, an early adopter, said through senior vice president of software engineering Jim Ostrognai that the service lets the company build connections to Google Cloud “with the same ease as deploying internal AWS resources.”
Why Two Rivals Are Sharing a Pipe
Enterprise demand is the surface-level explanation. A Futuriom survey cited by Network World found 82% of enterprises expect AI workload growth to accelerate multicloud adoption, and that pressure gives AWS and Google Cloud a shared commercial reason to lower the friction between their platforms.
Google Cloud appears to be the more consistent driver of that openness. The company had already built similar interconnects with Oracle and demonstrated interoperability with Azure before this deal, a pattern that fits a smaller cloud provider with more to gain from reducing switching costs than a market leader like AWS has.
AWS’s motivation looks more strategic than purely customer-driven. Forrester analyst Lee Sustar described the move as AWS “leveraging its market share to muscle the industry into making its approach a de facto standard,” a framing that casts the open specification as AWS-authored rather than neutral. David Terrar, CEO of the UK Tech Industry Forum, raised a related regulatory concern, noting that the UK Competition and Markets Authority could examine the deal given that AWS and Microsoft together control roughly 80% of the cloud market against Google’s 5 to 10%. The European Commission is separately pursuing its own inquiry into cloud market dominance, a reminder that regulators are watching cloud consolidation closely even when two providers frame a deal as customer-friendly.
Control Is Moving From the Model Layer to the Plumbing
My take: the deal reads as coopetition, not detente. AWS is not ceding ground so much as setting the standard for how multicloud connectivity works, while remaining the party that provisions, bills, and monitors the connection through its own console. Enterprises adopting the service to reduce dependence on a single cloud provider may end up routing more cross-cloud traffic through AWS-controlled infrastructure than they did before, not less.
The bigger signal for business leaders is where competitive advantage is shifting. As AI workloads push more companies toward genuine multicloud architectures, the layer worth watching is no longer just which provider has the best models or the cheapest compute. It is who controls the interconnect standard everyone else has to build on top of. Enterprises negotiating multicloud strategy this year should treat “open specification” claims with the same scrutiny applied to any vendor-authored standard, useful today but worth reconfirming once Azure and Oracle support arrives.
Azure and Oracle Cloud support is due before the end of 2026, and the rollout will be the real test of whether the specification stays open or simply becomes the terms rivals accepted because they had no better option. Until then, the fastest path for moving data between AWS and Google Cloud runs through a pipe AWS built, sells, and bills by the hour.
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