I’m sure they are still heavily investing in CapEx given their growth.
You have to remember that AWS had a more linear path so capex investment was spread out over a longer time line. Meanwhile Google had to rebuild all of AWS infra and capacity basically over night.
That coupled with high revenue growth leads to a large loss in the build out years. As revenue increase YoY slows down that loss will begin to narrow.
Same reason Amazon didn't show a profit for years. Just means they are continuing to spend more than they make in an effort to grow and to find those killer apps and services that will make them the dominant player.
From what I hear they are giving out sweetheart deals to large customers that aren't making money, but hey they can claim to run "X" company's cloud instances.
They do have a reputation issue, and it does cost them some business. There are CTOs who basically won't touch a google product in beta because there are so many things that get pulled.
That being said they are good at running vms and storage. They are really good at running kubernetes. Their network is amazing.
I would find it hard to take a CTO seriously who can't differentiate between beta and "generally available", or consumer product and enterprise cloud product.
It's a bit like saying you wouldn't use AWS because of Fire Phone.
AWS and Azure are basically printing money.