When Google was first founded in 1998, it was with a famously ambitious mission: to organise the world’s information.

So when Google started to get into the market for cloud computing — where businesses large and small can rent fundamentally unlimited supercomputing power — it wasn’t immediately clear how IT services fit into that mission.

“To me, Google Cloud is a natural extension of our mission to make the world’s information accessible and usable,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said on stage at this week’s Google Cloud Next conference. “We’re just doing it for businesses.”

In an increasingly digital world, Pichai says, businesses are generating way more information than they could sift through on their own. To Pichai’s mind, he says, Google’s investments in artificial intelligence provides businesses with products that help them “sort through their information” and provide better services.

What Pichai is signalling is that Google Cloud isn’t one of the search advertising giant’s many side projects — instead, he sees it as something core to the company’s major businesses.

Given that Google cloud guru Urs Hölzle has said that he thinks cloud revenue could one day overtake its advertising revenue, it’s a meaningful show of support from the top brass.

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