They do already have at least _some_ edge presence. But my understanding is that's largely been for distributing content, like YouTube. I imagine storage/bandwidth at the edge are largely solved problems for Google.

Has Google needed to run code physically closer to the user up until now? Likely not. Gmail/AdSense/etc. probably don't have [many] use cases where putting compute physically closer to the user (versus physically closer to a database replica) adds a ton of value.

With the advent of AI/ML, that's changing. Accurately recognizing speech, recognizing people and objects in streaming video, translating text, etc. likely don't require access to other resources, but the latency between the server and the user is super important. Video games are essentially the epitome of the use case: you're not going to need to bang out many queries across the Google network to play a round of Splatoon, but every millisecond of lag you can shave off, the more valuable your service becomes.

I could see Google selling cloud functions that execute within shouting distance of the user. What would the round trip be? 30ms? This could be a play by Google to take on Cloudflare workers.