The two rivals still need each other. In 2021, Apple paid more than 300 million for 8 ExaBytes
In May 2021, a source confirmed to The Information that Apple paid Google a fortune each year, 150 million in 2020 and 300 in 2021, increasing 50% year over year since then. Apple had a strong dependence on external agents: not in vain, 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 toll considering that Google paid Apple the astronomical figure of 20 billion dollars to be the search engine default in 2022, according to a Bloomberg report published in the wake of court documents requested by the antitrust lawsuit against Google. All that changed when the European Commission imposed a new measure: the user’s free choice of browser and search engine. That is, you can no longer reverse that investment.
More than four million 2TB accounts
Apple Services is the second largest division, responsible for 22% of revenue in 2023. This 2024 Apple expected to surpass $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 in which it stores some of the information. We say “part” because the volume of data is such that the company has to resort to third-party services to accommodate the information of all users. As we indicated, The Information reported some time ago that the bill that Apple pays to Google for the use of Google Cloud had increased by 50%, moving to eight exabytes of information, that is, eight billion gigabytes. Or, in other words, four million 2TB iCloud accounts.
As astonishing as these numbers are, and as much as they make Apple the largest Google Cloud customer, even reaching internally receive the nickname Bigfoot, the truth is that the proportion of accounts that store their data on Google is rather small. As we said above, it is estimated that there are more than 150 million paid iCloud accounts worldwide.
With Apple Intelligence and iOS 18, the company is moving towards greater independence and operability without the need for third parties. Services like iCloud+ make it clear that Apple is no longer a dependent company, but rather has its own server farms to supply virtual space to individuals. And it makes all the sense in the world that this trend continues in the same direction. And above all, 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 the size of iCloud. Because the plans with 50 GB of storage for 0.99 euros, 200 GB of storage for 2.99 euros and 2 TB of storage for 9.99 euros, We can go up to the brutal figure of 12 TB per month for 59.99 euros per monthwhich is actually a gift if we take into account the size of the infrastructure behind it.
In Applesfera | iPhone 16: release date, price, models and everything we think we know about them
In Applesfera | How to create an iCloud account from any device
