Volkswagen has chosen Microsoft as its cloud partner, with plans to build a network of Azure-connected cars as well as a Redmond-area office focused on cloud computing.
By 2020, Volkswagen plans to equip the 5 million Volkswagen cars it ships a year with a cloud service jointly developed by the two companies using Azure as a base, it announced in a press release Friday morning. The Volkswagen Automotive Cloud will support all of the car maker’s cloud services going forward, and Volkswagen plans to hire up to 300 people for an office that will be located near Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, it said.
“In the future, Volkswagen’s fleet of cars will become mobile ‘internet of things’ hubs linked by Microsoft Azure,” the car maker said in a press release. Specific details on what the service will actually look like were not provided, but Volkswagen did say that Azure IoT Edge will be part of its cloud service.
The deal represents an interesting customer win for Microsoft, which has been preaching the gospel of the “intelligent edge” basically since Satya Nadella became CEO in 2014. Cars are an excellent example of the unique demands of edge computing, with enough capacity to handle a significant amount of computing power yet often encumbered by slow or spotty internet connections.
Volkswagen’s cloud will be used to provide both entertainment and maintenance services to its customers, it said in the release.
