That was his excuse, there are some alternative theories that say that he put the rate limits only to cut his AWS bills.
Anyway, it should be known that fighting against scrapers is a lost cause. Nitter is still going strong, BirdSiteLive (the software that powers bird.makeup) as well, and even if he really blocked these alternative methods, I wouldn't be surprised if the archive.org people came up with some browser extension that could help replicate the content elsewhere.
While Twitter hosts some services on its own servers, the company has long contracted with Google and Amazon to complement its infrastructure. Prior to Musk buying Twitter last year, the company signed a multi-year contract with Google to host services related to fighting spam, removing child sexual abuse material, and protecting accounts, among other things.
No they have contracts with all of them because of acquisitions and attempts to be less reliant on just the data centers. Google cloud was another attempt to move some workloads or extend into it. But like I said earlier, nothing significant. Real work is done on the data center machines
Didn't Musk break Twitter a few weeks back in a hamfisted attempt to deal with scrapers? What that was he was fighting against?