Yesterday, a report from tech news publication CRN alleged that Apple is moving some of its cloud spending from Amazon Web Services to Google Cloud Platform. The report was verified by CRN through multiple anonymous sources, but Amazon, it appears, is still baffled by the leak.
“It’s kind of a puzzler to us because vendors who understand doing business with enterprises respect NDAs with their customers and don’t imply competitive defection where it doesn’t exist,” an Amazon spokesperson said.
Yesterday’s report claimed that Apple and Google reached a deal worth between $400 million and $600 million to host iCloud and other data on Google Cloud Platform. While earlier reports have predicted that Apple would be moving away from Amazon in the near future, switching to another cloud provider wasn’t a move many expected.
Apple has been working on its own data centers around the world, so the reasons for any deal with Google aren’t clear. It may be a stopgap measure while Apple spins up its own data centers, or it may be a strategic move to distribute its cloud infrastructure across many capable vendors instead of relying on just a couple.
Even with Apple potentially reducing its AWS spending, Amazon doesn’t have too much to worry about. Clients like Netflix and Airbnb are expanding operations, and those operations will likely require more power in the cloud. And as the Internet of Things expands, Amazon’s tools for integrating IoT services could also prove to be a lucrative income source for its cloud division.
