Bloomberg
Alphabet Inc’s Google has agreed to pay Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SpaceX) US$920 million a month for computing power as part of a cloud services deal that runs through mid-2029, its second such agreement with an artificial intelligence (AI) competitor in a matter of weeks.Google would pay SpaceX the monthly fee from October this year through June 2029, SpaceX said in a regulatory filing on Friday. That amounts to about US$30 billion through the time of the agreement.If SpaceX fails to deliver access to Nvidia Corp chips as part of the deal by Sept. 30, Google has the right to terminate the contract, with a one-month grace period, the filing showed.
SpaceX signage is displayed outside a Space Exploration Technologies Corp facility in Hawthorne, California, on March 26.
A Google Cloud spokesperson said the deal would help the company meet demand for its AI services. In its most recent earnings report, Alphabet said Google Cloud’s backlog — the measure of contracted work that has not been recorded as revenue yet — nearly doubled from the prior quarter to more than US$460 billion.“This is a short-term, timely agreement to ensure we have bridge capacity to meet surging customer demand for our agent platform, Gemini Enterprise, which has been even higher than we expected,” the Google spokesperson said in a statement.
