Google thinks AI is its ticket to catching Amazon and Microsoft in cloud computing. The Financial Times reports that Google Cloud is betting on artificial intelligence and edge computing to close the gap with AWS and Azure, which currently dominate the market.
Google has been here before. They open-sourced TensorFlow in 2015 and built custom Tensor Processing Units years before rivals offered specialized silicon. Anthropic signs a new agreement with Google for multiple gigawatts of next-generation TPU capacity expected to come online in 2027. Technical superiority didn't translate into enterprise deals. Companies hesitated to trust Google with critical infrastructure, citing the company's habit of killing consumer products and a perceived gap in enterprise support. The sales operation under Diane Greene, who ran Google Cloud from 2015 to 2019, couldn't match what AWS and Microsoft had spent years building.
Now Google is pushing AI again to win enterprise clients. The current boom in generative AI has companies rushing to adopt large language models, and Google claims it has the tools and expertise. But AWS and Microsoft aren't standing still. Both have moved fast into AI services, and a new AWS S3 Files feature makes S3 buckets accessible as file systems, built using Amazon EFS. It provides file system semantics and low-latency performance without data leaving S3, enabling file-based applications, AI agents, and teams to access data using existing tools without duplication. Google claims it has the tools and expertise. The real test won't be whether Google can build better AI tools. The question is whether enterprises believe Google will support those tools for the long haul.