GCP has been in the cloud business since 2008, two years after aws launched. They clearly were in a position to predict AWS’s profit margins before AWS publicized them given they were competing for same customers.
I remember when GCP launched, we had an all hands meeting for all of AWS, which all fit in a big conference room, less than 100 people. People thought now that Google got in the business that was it. The leadership, Andy Jassy, assured everyone that our jobs were safe and we could get back to work so to say. Seems funny now, but at the time AWS was S3 and EC2 and google was ahead it seemed.
A lot of people used to think that Amazon.com was subsidising AWS. Financials from other VPS providers suggested this to be the case.