Google has reportedly agreed a cloud computing deal with Meta worth more than $10 billion over six years, according to multiple reports. As part of the agreement, Meta will use Google Cloud’s servers, storage, networking and related services, to help it scale up its AI services.
The tie-up follows Meta’s accelerating investment in AI infrastructure. In July, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company would spend ‘hundreds of billions of dollars‘ building several massive AI data centres, including one almost the size of Manhattan.
As part of its spending spree, Meta recently lifted the lower end of its full-year capital expenditure guidance by $2 billion to a range of $66 billion–$72 billion. Additionally, earlier this month, Meta disclosed plans to offload around $2 billion of data centre assets to outside partners to help fund its AI build-out.
The tie-up with Google is another win for the search engine giant, which has been on a winning streak as of late. It comes hot on the heels of OpenAI adding Google Cloud as a supplier to meet surging compute needs – a notable move given OpenAI’s historically close ties to Microsoft.
For Google, the Meta agreement underscores momentum in its cloud unit as it competes with the larger AWS and Microsoft Azure, which are both facing scrutiny from the CMA in the UK for their dominant position in the cloud market.
This is unlikely to be the only deal signed by Meta, however. Like OpenAI’s recent deal with Oracle, Meta will want to spread its workloads across hyperscalers, which reduces single-vendor risk and may speed access to specialised accelerators.
