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How Meta's $10B cloud deal with Google helps it scale AI

The move favors both companies. It shows Google's leadership in cloud infrastructure and furthers the social media giant's goal of becoming the leader in AI superintelligence.

Esther Shittu
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Published: 27 Aug 2025

The $10 billion six-year cloud contract between Google and Meta shows how the social media giant plans to continue scaling across all cloud providers as it works toward its goal of superintelligence.

Last week, multiple media sources revealed that Meta had struck a deal with Google, mainly to use its AI infrastructure.

The news comes after Meta revealed during its latest earnings reports that Q2 revenue was $47.52 billion, which increased by 22% year-over-year. Total Q2 costs and expenses were $27.07 billion, an increase of 12% year-over-year. The company expects its 2025 total expenses to be between $114 and $118 billion. The social media giant said higher infrastructure and pay costs primarily drove its Q2 expenses.

"Our primary focus remains investing capital back into the business, with infrastructure and talent being our top priorities," chief financial officer Susan Li said during the call. “We also expect that developing leading AI infrastructure will be a core advantage in developing the best AI models and product experiences, so we expect to ramp our investments significantly in 2026 to support that work.”

Meta's need to scale

With that being the goal, this deal is mainly about scaling.

"They're looking for compute scaling, they're looking for infrastructure scaling," said Chirag Dekate, an analyst at Gartner. "What they need is raw computing power, delivered in a reliable, predictable manner."

The deal with Google is also on brand with Meta, as it has typically worked with all the cloud hyperscalers.

"Working with its own data centers and all three hyperscalers requires Meta to ensure its AI platforms work equally well on all of this infrastructure, which is important when it comes to ensuring the highest possible degree of scalability," said Torsten Volk, an analyst at Omdia, a division of Informa TechTarget. "Working toward superintelligence, the highest possible degree of scalability is a critical competitive advantage for Meta over each hyperscaler individually."

The benefit for Google

Despite this being a strategic move for Meta to help it scale, it is also a win for Google, Dekate said.

"This is a firm validation of its AI-native leadership," he said. He added that Meta also chose Google because of its networking stack.

"They have innovated their own core infrastructure stack that enables them to scale across data centers and also enable software-defined networking at a scale that was not addressable by others," he said.

While Google and Meta are competitors when it comes to AI models and other aspects, including advertising, search and consumer markets, the infrastructure level is a different matter, Dekate said.

"At the infrastructure layer, it highlights the need and desire to continue to tap into data center capacity, continue to tap into high efficiency, high reliability, high capability, AI compute resources, wherever they may occur," he said.

Meta is not the only AI vendor partnering with Google. OpenAI also added Google as a Cloud provider earlier in the summer.

"The fact that Google's competitors are using their infrastructure is not just a testament to their infrastructure leadership, but also to their security, isolation and how Google competes in the space," Dekate said.

He added that having a good infrastructure or cloud provider is also necessary for the GenAI race and Meta's push to superintelligence.

"The race that Meta, Gemini, and OpenAI are on, they are actually going for the consumer market first because the direction of diffusion is consumer first, followed by enterprise," he said.

To be the best in the consumer market, a vendor needs excellent infrastructure to tap into any inference mechanism and train the best AI models.

Esther Shittu is an Informa TechTarget news writer and podcast host covering artificial intelligence software and systems.

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