Uber Closing All Data Centers, Moving To Google, Oracle Clouds

Uber is ditching its own data centers in favor of the cloud. 

The San Francisco-based ride-hailing giant is switching from largely operating its own IT infrastructure to using cloud platforms operated by Google and Oracle, the companies announced Monday in separate releases. Uber signed seven-year agreements with both cloud providers, and it plans to fully migrate from its self-operated data center assets and close those facilities in the coming months. 

Around 95% of Uber’s IT infrastructure is housed in data centers it owns or leases from colocation providers, according to The Wall Street Journal. Experts say this makes Uber an outlier among tech companies of similar scale, most of whom have long been outsourcing sizable chunks of their computing needs to cloud giants like Google, Amazon Web Services or Microsoft. 

“At the end of the day, everyone’s looking to cut internal costs so they can maximize their profits,” said Gartner Vice President Sid Nag, according to the WSJ. “I think this was an inevitable outcome for a company like Uber. They eventually had to do this.”

Indeed, the use of cloud platforms — where computing power is purchased as a service from a third party — is often less expensive than self-operated data centers and makes it far easier for a company to scale its computing resources up or down as needed. Since 2020, global spending on cloud infrastructure has grown by around 20% annually.

Uber’s leadership said the company spent 11 months evaluating the planned cloud transition, eventually deciding to split the deal between Google and Oracle to minimize risk and to take advantage of specific technologies provided by each platform. For example, Uber’s use of Google Cloud will coincide with a switch to Google Maps from its proprietary navigation platform. 

"Cloud migration is often seen as a way of achieving the scale, performance, and security necessary to enable a digital business to thrive," Matt Eastwood, a senior vice president and analyst at International Data Corp., said in a statement released by Google. "What is particularly interesting with this partnership is the depth of the co-innovation spanning Google businesses and technologies which are being leveraged in order to deliver the technology innovation and customer experience improvements to further differentiate Uber in the marketplace."

Like many companies, Uber has kept the specifics of its owned and leased data center infrastructure close to the vest. Uber bought a Colorado data center from Microsoft in 2015, according to Data Center Dynamics. And executives have spoken about leasing from colocation providers in multiple major markets, expressing interest in wholesale leases of entire facilities.