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I am new to networking, I found out that I can use traceroute to see the routers that my packets travel through in order to get to their final destination.

For example: In order to get to Google.com, a packet needs to travel only through 15 routers. The first router is my home router of course. But what about the other routers, if only 15 routers my packet needs to travel to get from one country to the other, I would imagine that these routers are "huge". How do these "huge routers" look like? Do they even consist of one device, or are they really a group of devices that behave like one router?

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The majority of the routers in the Traceroute output are owned and operated by service providers and are responsible for routing large volumes of traffic over the internet. As such, these routers (typically called carrier grade, core or backbone routers) are much larger than the average home router and can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Cisco CRS routers are sold as backbone routers to give you an idea of scale and feature set: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier_Routing_System?oldformat=true

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