Vodafone and Google cosy up with $1 billion cloud and AI partnership

The expanded partnership, worth in excess of a billion dollars, covers AI, cloud, cybersecurity, content, and devices. Search and advertising also gets a mention, evoking rose-tinted recollections of the Google of old.

The deal is valid for 10 years, and covers 15 Vodafone markets plus 45 of its partner markets throughout Europe and Africa.

The nucleus of this deal is, well, Nucleus, which is the name of the massive data lake Vodafone and Google have been building together since 2021. Nucleus hosts Dynamo, a data analytics platform that provides Vodafone with the insights it needs to offer a better, more tailored customer experience for both consumers and enterprises.

Voda and Google plan to upgrade it with the latter's Vertex AI platform, laying the foundation for new machine learning capabilities and applications powered by Google's Gemini large language model (LLM). This should make it quicker and easier for Voda's operating companies around the world to launch exciting new products and generally be more innovative.

Prospective and existing Vodafone customers should probably also brace themselves for a barrage of offers pushing various Google products and services.

That's because under the partnership, Voda has agreed to market and sell a broader range of Pixel and other Android devices across Europe. They are also working towards Vodafone potentially reselling YouTube subscriptions and Google One AI Premium – a paid-for cloud service that includes access to Gemini – in select territories from 2025.

Voda also plans to upgrade its TV set-top-boxes (STBs) with content search and recommendations provided by Google generative AI (GenAI). Further down the line it also plans to adopt advertising powered by Google Ad Manager.

In addition, Voda and Google have agreed to co-develop a cloud-native cybersecurity solution based on Google Cloud's Security Operations platform. The plan is to offer incident and event management, and software-based protection tools to customers. Voda will also leverage Google's cybersecurity tools when developing certain products and services, ensuring it ticks the all-important 'secure-by-design' box.

"Together, Vodafone and Google will put new AI-powered content and devices into the hands of millions of more consumers. Using these services, our customers can discover new ways to learn, create and communicate, as well as consume TV, on a scale we haven't seen before," said Vodafone CEO Margherita Della Valle.

"Our expanded partnership with Vodafone will help bring our most advanced AI products and services, including our Gemini models, to more people across Europe and Africa," added Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet. "I'm excited to see how Vodafone's consumers, small businesses and governments, will use generative AI and Google Cloud to transform the way they work and access information."

The big question arising from this expanded partnership is how it lines up with the 10-year, $1.5 billion partnership Vodafone struck with Microsoft back in January.

That agreement – which also covers Europe and Africa, and which also puts a heavy emphasis on AI – appears to be more skewed towards customer service, cloud services for enterprises, and IoT. It also covers the digital transformation of Voda's internal processes – including the migration of its M-Pesa mobile money service to Microsoft Azure.

With two large, sprawling partnerships there is bound to be some overlap though. Careful management will be required to ensure they function together in harmony, rather than overly complicate and ultimately obstruct Vodafone's ambition to be more agile and innovative.