In May 2021, a source confirmed to The Information that Apple paid Google a fortune every year, 150 million in 2020 and 300 in 2021, a 50% year-on-year increase since then. Apple was heavily dependent on external agents: it is not for nothing that iCloud user data is stored both in Amazon Web Services and in the Google cloud. To this day, Apple IDs are still distributed between their own servers, those of Amazon, Google and those of Microsoft Azure.
However, this is an acceptable assessment given that Google paid Apple a staggering $20 billion to be the search engine default in 2022, according to a Bloomberg report released following court documents requested in the antitrust lawsuit against Google. All this changed when the European Commission imposed a new measure: the user’s free choice of browser and search engine. In other words, you can no longer cancel this investment.
Over four million 2TB accounts
Apple Services is the second largest division, responsible for 22% of revenue in 2023. This 2024 Apple expected to exceed $500 billion in revenue and a quarter will come from services. However, Apple doesn’t give too many details about the infrastructure that allows more than 150 million paid iCloud accounts to store millions of gigabytes of information.
What we do know is that Apple has a good number of data centers where it stores certain information. We say “part” because the volume of data is such that the company must use third-party services to accommodate information from all users. As we noted, The Information reported some time ago that the bill Apple pays Google for using Google Cloud had increased by 50% to eight exabytes of information
As astonishing as these numbers are, and even though they make Apple Google Cloud’s largest customer, reaching even internally receiving the nickname Bigfoot, the truth is that the proportion of accounts that store their data on Google is rather low. As we said above, it is estimated that there are over 150 million paid iCloud accounts worldwide.
With Apple Intelligence and iOS 18, the company is moving towards more independence and operability without resorting to third parties. Services like iCloud+ make it clear that Apple is no longer a dependent company, but rather has its own server farms to provide virtual space to individuals. And it makes perfect sense that this trend continues in the same direction. And especially, to avoid bleeding with third parties.
Every day we generate more and more information that we store “in the cloud”, without stopping to think about how to free up space in iCloud or being too aware of what it means to manage a cloud of the iCloud size. Because the packages with 50 GB of storage for 0.99 dollars, 200 GB of storage for 2.99 dollars and 2 TB of storage for 9.99 dollars, You can go up to the brutal figure of 12 TB per month for 59.99 dollars per monthwhich is actually a gift when you take into account the size of the infrastructure behind it.
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