Apple has dramatically increased the amount of data it stores on Google's cloud services, suggesting that storage needs have grown faster than it can handle with its own servers.
In May 2021, Apple was on track to spend about $300 million on Google cloud storage services, an increase of about 50 percent from the previous year, according to a source opposite The Information. In November 2020 alone, Apple is said to have increased the amount of user data it stored on Google services by about 470 petabytes. According to the report, the total amount of data on Google's cloud is now more than 8 exabytes. To better understand this enormous amount, here's a comparison: A single exabyte is large enough to record a video call that lasts more than 237,000 years - crazy, right? This means that Apple is now the largest corporate customer of Google's cloud services. According to the report, Apple is referred to internally at Google as "Bigfoot" for this reason. Incidentally, in 2018, Apple confirmed that it uses Google's cloud services for user data.
Google Cloud Storage: Apple Seems to Have Made a Good Deal
Apple's data needs also far dwarf any other Google customer. Apple's 470 petabyte increase in November was roughly equal to the total storage needs of Google's second-largest customer, TikTok operator ByteDance. Apple also appears to have negotiated a good deal for Google's cloud storage. According to cost calculators on Google's website, storing 8 exabytes of data costs about $218 million a month. Apple, in turn, pays Google about $300 million a year to store the same amount. It remains unclear, however, why Apple's storage on Google's cloud services has increased so dramatically. However, the purchase suggests that it is either more cost-effective for Apple to book more storage than to build new capacity, or that Apple has grown so big so quickly that it has been unable to procure, build and maintain the first-party servers needed to store the data in a timely manner.
Apple also uses Amazon Web Services
After Apple and ByteDance, Spotify was Google's third-largest customer with about 460 petabytes of data, Twitter came in fourth with 315 petabytes, and Snapchat was third with about 275 petabytes. Apple stores users' iCloud data on both Amazon Web Services and Google's cloud. This data is encrypted by Apple, meaning neither Amazon nor Google can get to the customer's iCloud information. Although AWS still has the lion's share of the overall cloud storage market, Google has carved out a niche for itself. Apple, for example, uses a form of Google cloud storage known as object storage, which is designed for data needs such as audio and video files, as well as documents. (Photo by Antwon McMullen / Bigstockphoto)
