Delhi Data Centre Fire Causes Google Cloud Service Outage Across Parts of India

There are network outages and increased latency affecting Google Cloud services in several big Indian cities. This is all happening because of a fire that broke out at a data centre in the nation's capital that is owned and operated by a third party.

Because of the fire, networking equipment had to be powered down in an emergency, cutting off a local Point of Presence (POP) in Delhi. Updates to the Google Cloud Service Health dashboard show that these precautions lowered the metro area's available network capacity. It all started at midnight on 9 June. Google Cloud is reportedly seeing spikes in latency and packet loss from some locations, including Delhi, Chennai, Mumbai, and the surrounding territories.

Google Cloud Facing Cascading Effect

Apps, websites, and internal corporate systems can all experience slowdowns as a result of these interruptions, which affect both businesses and users. Competitors to Google Cloud include Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, two of the biggest cloud providers in the world. Google Cloud's primary function is to execute AI tools and handle massive amounts of data.

While restoration operations are ongoing, the unit stated that there is no way around the problem and added that it is looking into other traffic reduction strategies to lessen the impact. In an effort to resolve the latency problems experienced by its users, Google has stated that it is looking at further traffic mitigations and the enhancement of Internet Edge peering. Due to suboptimal network routing and slightly increased latency, customers may encounter issues when connecting to Google Cloud until the impacted facility is completely repaired.

Google Signs $920 Million-Per-Month Computing Deal

Google has agreed to pay Elon Musk's SpaceX $920 million a month for computing power as part of a cloud-services deal. According to a Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) filing by Spacex, the deal runs through mid-2029. As per the agreement, Google will pay Spacex the monthly fee from October through June 2029, with capacity ramping up through September at a reduced cost.

In case SpaceX fails to deliver the access to the 'guaranteed' Nvidia chips as part of the deal by September 30, Google has the right to terminate the contract, with a one-month grace period. SpaceX has announced the deal just days before the company’s stock is expected to start trading on the Nasdaq exchange. As per the SEC filing, the Google-Spacex compute deal covers approximately 110,000 NVIDIA GPUs, CPUs, memory, and other related components.

It seems like the arrangement is on par with the one SpaceX announced with Anthropic in late May, both in terms of duration and breadth. Under the terms of the agreement, Anthropic will rent all of the computing power from SpaceX's Colossus 1 data centre, located outside Memphis, Tennessee, for $1.25 billion per month until 2029. In the beginning, Elon Musk's xAI used this data centre for its own AI projects.