Apple uses Google servers to store over 8 million TB of iCloud data

Apple proudly claims that billions of its devices are used by people across the world. The more people use Apple devices translates into humongous amount of user data. To store that data — which is on iCloud — Apple reportedly relies on Google’s servers, as per a report by The Information.
The report states that Apple has about 8 million terabytes (TB) of data that is currently stores on Google’s servers. It was earlier reported that Apple will spend close to $300 million on Google storage services. This number would be a significant 50% increase on what Apple had spent on data storage in 2020.
Such is the volume of Apple’s data on Google’s servers that internally Google employees have codenamed the company as Bigfoot. The report says that Apple is Google Cloud’s biggest client.
It’s not as if Apple doesn’t have its own data centres but it relies on third-party storage services. However, the report says that Apples iCloud storage requirements have grown tremendously and the company doesn’t have enough data centres to handle the demand.
Apart from Google, Amazon Web Services is also used by Apple to store iCloud user data that includes photos, messages among others.
Since Apple’s focus on privacy has been sharp, no third-party storage providers are given the keys to decrypt the data — meaning top-notch security with no one being able to access the data.
The report speculates that Apple’s increased use of Google Cloud suggests the company’s rising cloud storage requirements have outpaced its ability to develop and operate its own data centres needed to handle the resulting data.
If Apple relies on Google for data servers and pays huge sums of money, then Google also pays Apple quite a lot for allowing Search to be a part of iOS and iPhone’s default search engine. It was reported that Google pays Apple billions of dollars every year to do so.