Revision: While I'll leave this critique here for the archives, the concerns and confusion over Mina Protocol's use of Google Cloud and the archive nodes has been addressed by Evan Shapiro, an O(1) Labs CEO & Mina Foundation Board Member.

In summary, running an archive node is optional to anyone who wishes to run a node, and node operators have free reign to run the nodes on Google Cloud, personal machines, or even durable storage like Arweave.

Evan also addresses the concerns over low through-put (TPS), stating the team chose to focus on optimizing launch time for Mina as one of the first programmable platforms to successfully utilize ZKPs. He says that increasing TPS will come second, and will be rather easy and not take as much time as the former goal.

Source: https://medium.com/minaprotocol/answering-community-questions-and-whats-ahead-for-mina-d771fa94489b