There is a middle ground between the two extremes of building your own datacenter from bare land, and using GCP or Azure or similar to host everything. Using WA and Oregon states as an example there's plenty of datacenter companies that will rent you "powered shell" space with cooling to do whatever you want with.
There are plenty of datacenter-owning real estate investment trusts that build huge facilities expressly for the purpose of turning around and immediately subleasing space to large third parties. With facilities that are already built and online this can reduce your 3-year timespan to a couple of months from contract execution to thousands of live servers, if the people doing the contracts and technical specs are sharp.
For a company the size of Apple, if they do have intentions to 100% own their datacenters, this sort of thing would be a stopgap solution. But it's a possibility.
Google, Facebook, Apple, Salesforce are listed as customers of large wholesalers like DFT. Like you mentioned, it's easier to get someone else to build and run the building (to your specs). Plus there is some anonymity too.
It adds 20 and 30 year lease stability to DRT's portfolio. DFT still operates under the DFT name for now. Just like telx which was also a DRT acquisition.
There are plenty of datacenter-owning real estate investment trusts that build huge facilities expressly for the purpose of turning around and immediately subleasing space to large third parties. With facilities that are already built and online this can reduce your 3-year timespan to a couple of months from contract execution to thousands of live servers, if the people doing the contracts and technical specs are sharp.
For a company the size of Apple, if they do have intentions to 100% own their datacenters, this sort of thing would be a stopgap solution. But it's a possibility.