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Apple has dramatically increased the amount of data it stores on Google’s cloud services, indicating that its storage needs have grown faster than it can handle with its own servers.
As of May 2021, Apple was on track to spend around $ 300 million on Google’s cloud storage services this year, a 50% year-over-year increase, a source told The Information.
In November 2020 alone, Apple increased the amount of user data it stores on Google services by 470 petabytes, bringing the total amount of data in Google’s cloud to over 8 exabytes. For reference, an exabyte is enough to record a video call spanning over 237,000 years, Apple Insider reports.
Apple is now ranked as Google’s largest cloud service customer. Within the latter, “Apple” has a nickname for its size, “Bigfoot”.
Apple’s data needs also exceed any other Google customer, and Apple’s increase of 470 petabytes in November was the same as the total storage used by Google’s second customer, which is ByteDance is the owner of the ‘TikTok app.
It is not known why Apple’s storage has dramatically increased on Google’s cloud services. But it looks like the US tech giant has grown so rapidly that it hasn’t been able to build and maintain its own servers on time, which is needed to store the data.
After Apple and ByteDance, Spotify is Google’s third customer with 460 petabytes of data, followed by Twitter in fourth with 315 petabytes, while Snapchat is third with 275 petabytes.
Apple stores user data in iCloud on both Amazon Web Services and the Google Cloud. This data is encrypted by Apple, which means that neither Amazon nor Google can obtain the customer’s iCloud information.
Although Amazon still has the lion’s share of the total cloud storage market, Google has carved out a niche for itself. Apple, for example, uses a form of cloud storage from Google known as “object storage,” designed to handle data needs such as audio and video files, as well as documents.
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