Alphabet earnings show Google Cloud on $10B run rate

Post by Cthulhu_ » Thu, Feb 06, 2020, 11:15 AM UTC

jillesvangurp wrote: post #41

georgewfraser wrote: post #3

I would really love to know what the quarterly revenue is for just compute and storage, for each of the major cloud providers. Including things like G Suite and Office 365 just muddies the waters.

More specifically, they should just break these huge corporations up. Better for everyone long term, except maybe their tax dodging share holders. Google has conflicts of interest competing against their own cloud customers, some of whom are also ad customers, with products that get preferential treatment on the same platforms. Same for MS. Same for Amazon. Same for Apple. They each have overlapping businesses that a…

Post by OskarS » Thu, Feb 06, 2020, 11:34 AM UTC

pingyong wrote: post #62

davedx wrote: post #43

Does anyone know if there are numbers somewhere for how much energy the different cloud providers use? Would be interesting to see which is more efficient from that perspective for those of us who care about such things. Energy per $ revenue or even better per compute would be helpful.

A cloud provider that specializes in compute will have vastly higher energy costs than a cloud provider that specializes in storage. Even without explicit specialization, it's not unreasonable to assume that the distribution of compute-heavy and storage-heavy customers is quite different between providers. So you'd have to sort of calculate that out. But if you do that, I'm not sure what would even differentiate them…

Post by ksec » Thu, Feb 06, 2020, 11:37 AM UTC

cowsandmilk wrote: post #74

davedx wrote: post #43

Does anyone know if there are numbers somewhere for how much energy the different cloud providers use? Would be interesting to see which is more efficient from that perspective for those of us who care about such things. Energy per $ revenue or even better per compute would be helpful.

Should I expect ARM processors to be the most energy efficient for compute? Eg if I’m in AWS, should I be choosing graviton instances?

Post by Mirioron » Thu, Feb 06, 2020, 11:43 AM UTC

OskarS wrote: post #83

pingyong wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A cloud provider that specializes in compute will have vastly higher energy costs than a cloud provider that specializes in storage. Even without explicit specialization, it's not unreasonable to assume that the distribution of compute-heavy and storage-heavy customers is quite different between providers. So you'd have to sort of calculate that out. But if you do that, I'm not sure what would even differentiate them…

I agree it's rather strange to ask for who has the lowest energy usage when you're a cloud customer. "I want to rent this computer to do X, but it shouldn't consume any electricity" is not a reasonable demand. However: one could say that these companies are now big enough that it is reasonable to start demanding that these companies source the energy in a climate-friendly way. I think it's not at all unreasonable to…

Post by sgt101 » Thu, Feb 06, 2020, 11:51 AM UTC

barney54 wrote: post #82

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Carbon neutrality is a flawed statistic IMO and can be doctored with a lot - e.g. if Google pays a company X to plant an amount of trees, who's to say that neutralizes carbon? Keep it simple, just publish how much power they're using and what the sources are.

I’m not sure what you mean by publish “what the power sources are.” Data centers are grid connected and are therefore connected to a lot of different generators—including coal, natural gas, wind, solar, and hydro. All generators on the grid contribute to the grid. It’s really tough to single out a generation source for a particular user.