Sundar Pichai, Alphabet CEODavid Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Google is moving parts of its popular YouTube video service from the advertising company’s internal data center infrastructure to the company’s cloud service, the head of Google’s cloud said.
The effort indicates Google is looking inward as it seeks to expand its share of the growing cloud-computing market and become less reliant on advertisements appearing on its web search engine and other properties.
Historically, Google has leaned on its own systems to run its most widely used applications across computer servers in its data centers. The Google Cloud Platform offering has coexisted separately, and Google has not undertaken the effort to migrate its eponymous search engine, for example, to the Google public cloud.
But the company’s perspective on the value of having its top products use the cloud just like third-party applications has shifted.
“Part of evolving the cloud is having our own services use it more and more, and they are,” Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, told CNBC in an interview last month. “Parts of YouTube are moving to Google Cloud.”
The change will bring Google more in line with its main U.S. competitors, Amazon and Microsoft.
In 2019 Amazon said its consumer