One of Apple’s biggest investments in cloud storage falls right into the pocket of one of the main rivals: Google. The company recorded a 50% increase in Google Cloud spending compared to 2020 annually, a company official told The Information.
Apple spent $300 million on Google Cloud in 2021
One of Apple’s focuses is transferring more services to its cloud storage division, iCloud. More and more users of the brand use the platform to store photos and videos, which increases the demand for servers capable of supporting the entire volume of data.
Who wins with this is Google Cloud, whose largest cloud customer is precisely Apple. The company has disbursed $300 million for Google to manage 8 exabytes of data —the equivalent of 8 million TB.
Google Cloud’s second-largest customer is TikTok’s startup, China’s ByteDance, which has a 500 petabyte storage contract, something like 500,000 TB —16 times less data.
Apple even gained codename within Google
Apple’s data footprint is so large and high-priority that Google would have internally dubbed the customer “Bigfoot,” according to The Information. The security of this information is still 100% the responsibility of the owner of iCloud, who handles the security keys.
Apple has its own facilities and databases around the world. But if the company’s demand for gadgets and software is much higher than it can get with its servers, it makes sense to seek help from outside.
But by negotiating with Google, the company founded by Steve Jobs gives immense power to one of its main competitors. Apple CEO Tim Cook himself, during the trial in the Epic Games case, said he doesn’t consider Google a rival. Then lawyers for the studio creator of the game Fortnite showed a video in which the executive claims that Google competes on the side of “operating system”.
