Google is continuing to invest billions of dollars in its data centers and overall presence at its attempt to garner a bigger share of the lucrative cloud market, though just not as many billions of dollars as it did last year.

Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai noted in a blog post today that the company would invest more than $10 billion this year into offices and data centers in the U.S. That investment will focus on 11 states where it currently has a presence. So prepare to have your economy/housing market further Google-fied in Colorado, Georgia, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New York, Oklahoma, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Washington, and California.

In addition to data centers and offices, Pichai said the investment would create “thousands of jobs – including roles within Google, construction jobs in data centers and renewable energy facilities, and opportunities in local businesses in surrounding towns and communities.”

The investment plan is a dip from the $13 billion Google pledged to invest last year, which also included a more concrete pledge to create more than 10,000 jobs. However, the latest pledge is still more than the $9 billion Google invested in 2018.

Analysts noted that while the 2020 number might be down compared with the previous year, they suspect its actual spend targeted at its cloud business will increase year over year.

"I do believe Google is making much larger cloud investments than it had in prior years and therefore it looks like consumer and ad spend is down," Patrick Moorhead, president and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, explained in an email to SDxCentral.

John Dinsdale, chief analyst and research director at Synergy Research Group, added that Google noted in its latest earnings call that it intended to increase capex spending in 2020. He also cited his firm's most recent capex report that had Google as No. 2 among hyperscalers on spending last year.

"Bottom line is that Google is continuing to spend huge amounts of money expanding and enhancing its data center footprint, as indeed are Amazon and Microsoft," Dinsdale noted in an email to SDxCentral.

Google has been heavily investing in its cloud operations in an attempt to steal market share from the top two cloud providers Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. To that end, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian has hired several long-time executives away from his former company Oracle as well as from Nutanix and SAP. It also spent billions of dollars on startups and cloud data centers, moved into enterprise on-premises data centers, and added services intended to appeal to enterprise customers.

These investments appear to be paying off as it reported its Google Cloud business — this covers all of its cloud computing efforts — generated $8.92 billion in revenue in 2019, and $2.61 billion in the fourth quarter alone. For comparison, Google Cloud brought in $5.84 billion in revenue in fiscal 2018, and $1.71 billion in the fourth quarter of that year.

“Given our position as a challenger, we’re investing aggressively, focused on building out our go-to-market capabilities, executing against our product roadmap, and extending the global footprint of our infrastructure focused on 21 markets and six industries,” CFO Ruth Porat said on the latest Alphabet earnings call.

Google management has also reportedly put pressure on its cloud operations to improve its market position by 2023.

It’s an ambitious goal, to put it gently. While Google has been gaining, Amazon’s share of worldwide public cloud revenues has hovered around 40% for a few years, and Microsoft’s has increased to almost 20%, according to Synergy Research Group. For comparison: Google controls around 10% of the market.