Damn, you are actually correct. I have read that whole article, and wasn't even sure what the contract was for, but it sounded like some super scary surveillance program. Your description of it sounded nothing like what that article painted at all.

Then I decided to search for other articles about this that are written a bit more competently[0], and yup, it all checks out. Looks like a typical "we are migrating our infra from on-prem to cloud with GCP and AWS".

0. https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/01/google-workers-protest-1-2...