Google announced that it had reached an agreement with Elon Musk's SpaceX to use the latter's growing satellite internet service, Starlink, with its cloud unit. Starlink terminals will be installed at Google's cloud data centers around the world, with the aim of using the cloud for Starlink customers and allowing Google to use the satellite network's fast internet for its enterprise cloud customers.

Customers will be able to use the Starlink-Google Cloud features, which include safe data transmission to remote areas of the world, by the end of 2021. According to a spokesperson for SpaceX, the first Starlink terminal will be installed at Google's data center in New Albany, Ohio, with more details on the relationship to be revealed in the June, 2021.

The partnership is a perfect fit for Elon Musk's SpaceX and Google, which invested $900 million in SpaceX in 2015 to cover a range of technologies, including satellite manufacturing. SpaceX has launched 1,625 Starlink satellites so far, with around 1,550 in orbit now. A Starlink beta program that started last year has attracted at least 10,000 participants from the United States, Canada, and a few European countries, with at least 500,000 $100 deposits from potential customers.

Musk's Starlink network faces stiff competition from Jeff Bezos' Amazon's Kuiper Project, which plans to launch more than 3,000 satellites in about the same orbit as Starlink to provide global broadband internet. The Google-SpaceX partnership is yet another strategic victory for Google in its fight with Amazon Web Services, Amazon's behemoth cloud services unit. Amazon executives have stated that they intend to use Kuiper's internet access to boost their AWS cloud services.

In a press release, Urs Hölzle, senior vice president of infrastructure at Google Cloud, said, "Applications and services running in the cloud can be revolutionary for companies, whether they're working in a highly networked or remote environment." Google is "delighted to partner with SpaceX to ensure that organizations with dispersed footprints have seamless, safe, and easy access to the essential applications and resources they need to keep their teams up and running," according to Hölzle.

According to SpaceX president and COO Gwynne Shotwell, the Google contract entails providing internet-data access to "businesses, public sector organisations, and several other groups working around the world." “By combining Starlink's high-speed, low-latency broadband with Google's infrastructure and capabilities, global companies can get the reliable and quick connectivity that modern businesses demand,” she said.

Last year, Microsoft, which operates another huge cloud service called Azure that competes with Amazon's cloud, formed a similar partnership with SpaceX. Shotwell said in a promotional video at the time that by putting Azure cloud data across Starlink's broadband highway, the two companies would be "co-selling to our mutual clients, co-selling to new business and potential customers" for data services.