Apple has been using Google Cloud Storage platform  for years, though the latest report says that the Cupertino-based company's investment has increased in the last year. A new report claims that Apple is on track to spend 50% more on Google Cloud Storage in 2020 than it did in 2015, and it now has over 8 exabytes of storage.

The Information in its latest report adds that Apple has surpassed ByteDance and Spotify as the largest corporate customer of Google cloud services. The report adds that the company plans to spend about $300 million on Google cloud storage in 2021. It compares the spending to that of 2020 and notes that it is around 50% higher than Apple's total 2020 spending.

Apple now has additional Cloud-based services, including the popular iCloud for multimedia data, which explains the surge in cloud storage costs. While Apple does have its own data centres for cloud services, it also uses services such as Google Cloud Storage to store customer data.

Breaking up the demand surge, the report claims that Apple in November 2020 the amount of user data stored on the Google Cloud Platform has increased by about 470 petabytes.

The report also claims that Google has given Apple the codename Bigfoot because of the company's vast data storage. The good news is that all personal data stored on Google Cloud Storage is encrypted with special security keys that are only available to Apple. The report adds that while Apple can build its own infrastructure to accommodate massive cloud storage requests, it is unable to match the rollout of its cloud service to the rate at which those demands are growing.

Apple stated in 2018 that it uses Google cloud services as a third-party provider to store iCloud customer data, thus the increase in spending on Google cloud services isn't unusual.

The new research on Apple's expanding cloud storage demands comes as the company prepares to deploy iCloud+, a privacy-focused feature that was announced earlier this month during the WWDC presentation. iCloud+, which was announced as an update to iCloud, will be accessible for the same monthly membership pricing as iCloud and will include features such as Private Relay, which prevents others from tracking your internet history. Hide my email and HomeKit Secure Video were also released as part of the iCloud+ bundle.