Apple has appointed Sumit Gupta as director of products, Apple Cloud.

Gupta spent the last three years at Google, most recently as the senior director and head of product management at Google Infrastructure.

At Google, Gupta said that he led "overall product strategy, business operations, and customer relationships for Google's data center infrastructure products, ranging from databases, analytics, resource managers, schedulers, compilers, TPUs/ARM CPUs, storage, & networking."

Prior to that role, Gupta was the senior director of product management for AI/ML infrastructure, where he says he "proposed and drove the creation of a new scalable TPU-based supercomputer pod and associated scaling software that is now the main product used to train large models (LLMs) at Google, including Gemini/Bard."

Gupta also spent nearly six years at IBM, most recently serving as the chief AI strategy officer & CTO of AI. From 2007 to 2015, he was the general manager of AI and GPU accelerated data centers at Nvidia.

There, Gupta says on his LinkedIn, he was "central in building this new startup AI & data center business within Nvidia from zero to a $1+ billion dollar data center business." With the boom of generative AI, Nvidia reported data center revenues of $18.4bn in its latest quarter.

Apple is now hiring infrastructure and cloud engineers to join Gupta's team. "We are building out a multi-cloud platform that will power Apple's key services ranging from Music, TV+, Sports, and AI/ML offerings," a recent job listing states. "Apple's Cloud infrastructure has core platform services and managed services required for public cloud development, deployment and wide-scale adoption."

The listing mentions preferred experience in two cloud platforms - Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services. Apple is believed to use both and has long been reported to be Google's single biggest storage customer. Last year, it began using Google to develop foundation AI models.

The AI efforts are spearheaded by John Giannandrea, who joined in 2018 as SVP of ML and AI strategy after a lengthy stint at Google. Within the wider AI group, the Foundational Models team is led by Ruoming Pang, who joined the company in 2021 after spending 15 years at Google. Samy Bengio, Apple's senior director of AI and machine learning research, also spent years at Google.

In 2019, it was reported that Apple was spending more than $30 million a month on Amazon Web Services.

Earlier this week, DCD exclusively reported that 2023 marked the first year that Apple's colocation data center power usage contracted year-over-year - after more than a decade of double-digit growth.

It also reduced its own data center footprint from eight to seven - but the smaller number of data centers consumed more power.

Across its own data centers and colocation, Apple used more than 2.3bn kWh of electricity in 2023. That does not reveal the actual power capacity of Apple's data centers, as they are unlikely to run at full load 24/7.

If they were, that would represent 263MW. But if they ran at 50 or 40 percent load, it would represent 525MW and 656MW respectively.

Apple's cloud footprint is undisclosed, but growing.