For a decade, AWS treated multicloud as organizational dysfunction. Not anymore.
AWS and Google Cloud have recently partnered to simplify multicloud networking, introducing a common standard and leveraging "AWS Interconnect - Multicloud" and "Google Cloud's Cross-Cloud Interconnect". This isn't marketing theater. Currently in preview, the solution combines AWS Interconnect – Multicloud with Google Cloud's Cross-Cloud Interconnect and defines an open interoperability specification that other cloud providers can also adopt.
What changed? The answer lies in two converging pressures: regulatory scrutiny and the AI cost crisis.
The Regulatory Pressure
The new connectivity will go some way to addressing criticism by regulators that AWS does too little to help enterprises operate across multiple cloud providers. The Competition and Markets Authority already scrutinizes cloud market concentration, and the European Commission launched its own review into AWS and Microsoft dominance in November 2024. AWS's pivot toward multicloud interoperability signals strategic capitulation to antitrust reality.
The Real Driver: AI Cost Shock
But regulation alone wouldn't move a $132 billion business. The actual catalyst is the emerging AI infrastructure cost catastrophe.
According to a 2025 Deloitte AI Infrastructure Survey, training modern foundation models can cost millions of dollars per run, with GPU clusters consuming megawatts of power during peak training phases. Cloud computing trends predict that GPU costs will continue to rise. Industrial GPUs, which generally run AI/ML tasks such as training transformer models, image recognition, and real-time inference, cost around $10,000–$30,000 per GPU.
This is where the cross-cloud interconnect becomes existential for enterprises. According to AWS documentation, the managed private connectivity service enables customers to define direct 1 Gbps connections between AWS VPCs and Google Cloud VPCs at no cost during the preview.
How This Reshapes Enterprise Strategy
Enterprise AI teams now face a genuine technical option they didn't have before. Want GPU access from Google Cloud's TPUs while running data pipelines on AWS? Now possible without weeks of networking complexity. Need to escape AWS's constrained Bedrock capacity? Route workloads to Google Cloud's Vertex AI without architectural rewrites.
All connections between the AWS and Google Cloud network devices are encrypted by default, and hardware is configured to transmit customer traffic only when the encryption session is active. This solution is built on a foundation of trust, utilizing MACsec encryption between the Google Cloud and AWS edge routers.
The Cost Optimization Imperative
Studies show that companies waste 30% of their total cloud spend. That number climbs sharply for AI workloads. Cloud FinOps is the practice of uniting finance, engineering, and business teams to manage cloud costs more effectively. In practice, FinOps helps you get more cloud performance per dollar spent. In 2026, FinOps principles won't be seen as "good to have," but will form the foundation for organizations starting their cloud cost optimization journey, ensuring every dollar spent on the cloud delivers measurable value.
The cross-cloud interconnect enables this. Teams can now arbitrage pricing between regions, escape capacity constraints on one provider by routing to another, and enforce cost discipline through competitive tension.
What Happens Next
Azure expected to join in 2026. When that happens, the multicloud narrative flips from "avoid lock-in" to "exploit competition." Organizations with matured FinOps practices and technical sophistication will see competitive advantage. Those still treating cloud as a single-vendor problem will face margin pressure.
AWS currently holds the market leader position with a 29 percent share as of Q3 2025. That dominance is now sustainable only through service quality and pricing discipline—not architectural lock-in.
The Age of Accidental Vendor Lock-In is ending. The Age of Strategic Multicloud Optimization is beginning. 2026 will separate enterprises that see this as a cost control mechanism from those that treat it as a curiosity.
Sources & References
[1] https://www.infoq.com/news/2025/12/aws-gcp-multicloud-networking/
[3] https://www.cloudkeeper.com/insights/blog/cloud-computing-trends-watch-2026
[4] https://www.cloudkeeper.com/insights/blog/top-12-cloud-cost-optimization-strategies-2026
[5] https://sedai.io/blog/cloud-cost-optimization-strategies
[6] https://www.channelinsider.com/infrastructure/aws-vs-azure-vs-google-cloud/
