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Google scores six-year Meta cloud deal worth over $10B
- petesergeant 1y agoWould be very interested to know how this is structured, as presumably it's a hedge for Meta's uncertainty about how much compute they'll need.
- pwarner 1y agoMeta is planning to spend $65B+ on capex this year. That's a lot of data centers. Why do they need a tiny bit more from Google?
- bmau5 1y agoAssuming this has a lot to do with Google's TPUs. Google is well positioned to be the AWS for AIs given the increased efficiency of TPUs, which only they have.
- geodel 1y agoCould be other way round too. Meta wants to use their own data centers capacity for their custom AI solutions. Generic compute and storage for online and batch workloads can be moved to Google cloud infra.
- bmau5 1y agoYep definitely could be
- yencabulator 1y agoAlso, AI training can be centralized but user serving benefits from being close to the user. So Meta might be building huge new data centers for AI training and centralized analytics etc, while using plenty of DCs owned by others around the globe to run their apps.
- thewebguyd 1y agoAssuming they don’t screw it up. Google has a ton of great stuff but when it comes to actually making into a product they flounder. GCP still needs a lot of work.
- okdood64 1y agoWhat more of a product do you need than being able to boot a machine with a TPU strapped on at relative low cost?
- burnt-resistor 1y agoGCP did that by firing senior support people and replacing them with more junior, offshore ones.
- liuliu 1y agoGCP getting second tier TPU allocation b/c TPU cannot be enough to meet GDM needs. At this point, it would be very stupid for external customers betting on TPUs (I am looking at Apple).
- bmau5 1y agoWhy would it be stupid?
- okdood64 1y ago> second tier TPU allocation What exactly does this mean?
- barkingcat 1y agoProbably that there are already several generations of TPU hardware - the best ones go to internal use, while the older hardware gets rented out to gcp to amortize the development costs.
- liuliu 1y agoThat's correct. Unless Zuck is OK with using one-generation older TPU, which is a possibility.
- richdougherty 1y agoSeems likely because the article says "Meta’s deal with Google is mainly around artificial intelligence infrastructure, said one of the people".
- mandeepj 1y ago> That's a lot of data centers. Why do they need a tiny bit more from Google? Data centers don’t pop up overnight, until then they are going to use a vendor :-)
- foobiekr 1y agothis is the correct answer.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- vasco 1y agoThis can be as simple as someone taking the time to collect all the GCP accounts accumulated over the years for random projects into an enterprise committed spend. Doesn't have to be anything that crazy or new.
- calmbonsai 1y agoGoogle needs deal this due to flights away from its cloud. It can't compete with Azure for simple/coarse-grained services and AWS for complex/fine-grained services. Atm, Google cloud is only good for cheap high-ram one-run-centric compute (AWS is cheaper for generic compute and reserved compute), simple container execution (Cloud Run), and ~100 TB bulk storage.
- thevillagechief 1y agoYour phrasing seems off. Why does Meta care what Google needs? It would seem that it's exactly backwards. Meta needs this because training resources are scarce. And Google is in the enviable position of having TPUs.
- sokoloff 1y agoI read GP as implying GCP would be inclined to negotiate aggressively to be sure to secure this deal, due to the factors they list. Both companies need to get something out of the deal. Listing the benefits to only one side is probably missing part of the story.
- calmbonsai 1y agoYes. That was exactly my point.
- mrbungie 1y ago> Atm, Google cloud is only good for cheap high-ram one-run-centric compute (AWS is cheaper for generic compute and reserved compute), simple container execution (Cloud Run), and ~100 TB bulk storage. You are crazy if you imply AWS Athena or Azure Synapse are better than BigQuery.
- seatac76 1y agoCame here to say that Big Query is a phenomenal product, that alone is a reason for a lot of companies to adopt GCP.
- barkingcat 1y agoIt's the ouroboros - snake eating its own tail.
- thrown-0825 1y agogotta keep that circular ai hype economy rolling
- Aissen 1y agoThe article is a bit misguided, since it "forgets" to add a bit of context until the penultimate paragraph: Meta is investing 10 times as much in building internal infrastructure capacity — this year alone. This deal is a rounding error (<1.7B / year); and with the scale of cloud costs in general, it's probably even invisible at Meta scale.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- bananapub 1y agodoes anyone know why? Meta has been doing the full stack integration of internal software down to machine builds for almost as long as google now; what's the point of outsourcing any of it after 20 years? is it some capex vs opex game? putting fear in the platform engineering people about losing their jobs?
- treesknees 1y agoMeta likely can’t construct new data centers quickly enough to meet the growing demand for AI. While they have plans to build them, it will take several years. Consequently, they have entered into this six-year contract with Google as a temporary solution.
- spwa4 1y agoSo a fairer way of putting this would be Meta pays Google $10B for AI ... and NVidia ... about 600B, maybe 700B over the same period.