For years, Apple has been using Google Cloud Services, yet the latest report indicates that the expenses of the Cupertino-based company climbed in the last year. One recent report says Apple spends over 50% more on Google Cloud Storage than it did in 2020. Apple’s iCloud data stored on Google’s cloud platform has been substantially increased. The company currently stores more than 8 million Terabytes of iCloud data on Google Cloud, far more than it does on other third-party storage platforms.
According to a report by The Information, Apple is codenamed by Google Cloud staff employees as Bigfoot, hinting that the California-based company is a whale-sized customer. The report further reveals that Apple is Google’s largest corporate cloud storage customer, with demand surpassing customers such as ByteDance or Spotify. Apple has been estimated to spend about $300 million on Google’s cloud storage services this year by the mid of May.
For context, Apple heavily relies on different cloud storage platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud to store iCloud user data in conjunction with its own data centres, including pictures, documents, and other data stored on your iCloud accounts by Apple users. To guarantee user privacy, Apple does not share the decryption keys with these third-party platforms.
Apple increased by roughly 470 petabytes the amount of user data is stored on Google’s services, bringing more than 8 exabytes of the total data it had on Google’s cloud. Fun fact a single exabyte is sufficient to record a video call spanning almost 237,000 years. Costing Apple around USD 218 million per month to avail of the service. If you do the calculation, this comes out to about $1 per month for 29GB or 3.5 cents per GB. The pricing of enterprise cloud storage is complicated, with fees charged not only for raw storage but also for all moving data in and out. Since the company offers live iCloud storage to its users, Apple is definitely moving many data back and forth.
Apple storage requirements have expanded drastically when more and more customers put their data on iCloud. Moreover, spending a truckload of money on Google servers to store 8 million terabytes of data proves that Apple cannot keep up with the accelerating growth of iCloud data storage through its own servers. Building such complicated and massive server farms requires a lot of land, resources, and time, and while the tech giant has plenty of cash, the process would take months.