Rumors that Elon Musk has bought Google persist, and are no more true now than they were a month ago, but it is certainly worth keeping up to date with SpaceX and Starlink’s partnership with the company’s cloud computing services.
In 2015, Google and Fidelity together invested $1 billion in SpaceX, meaning the partnership Elon Musk enjoys with the search engine and cloud computing giant has history.
The investment meant the Google and Fidelity together owned just under 10% of SpaceX.
“It’s no surprise that Alphabet is interested in space,” The Motley Fool wrote shortly afterwards. But what is at the root of Google’s partnership with Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Starlink companies, and what could it mean for the future of the Internet?
WHAT DOES THE PARTNERSHIP LINKING ELON MUSK, SPACEX, STARLINK AND GOOGLE ACTUALLY MEAN?
In a nutshell, one of the key ideas behind the partnership is to affordably bring a fast and secure Internet connection to that part of the world’s population that can’t currently get online. That’s roughly 2.9 billion. When running, data will travel from Google cloud services to Starlink satellites and then to end users, bypassing the need for expensive cell towers and dramatically increasing coverage.
2.9 billion is a big number and represents a lot of people. The UN’s ICT arm published a report in late 2021 claiming that more than a third of the world’s population have “still never used the Internet.”
In May 2021, Google said it had signed a partnership deal with Elon Musk’s SpaceX that would enable it to use the space company’s growing network of satellites, known as Starlink.
The deal will allow Starlink customers to use Google’s cloud computing capabilities while enabling Google to use Starlink’s fast Internet speeds for its cloud customers. READ MORE..
