Salesforce confirms deal with Google Cloud, reportedly worth $2.5 billion

As we reported in Friday’s FastForward newsletter, Salesforce and Google Cloud had apparently made a deal, although the details were murky. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff let the cat out of the bag last week on X, refuting a report in The Information that Salesforce was in talks with Microsoft, Oracle and Amazon. Benioff confirmed the deal was actually with Google, but didn't reveal any details, beyond the fact it closed at the end of last year.

That changed this morning when Salesforce sent out a press release with all of the particulars and Bloomberg reported that the deal is worth $2.5 billion over seven years. Salesforce wouldn’t confirm that number. Google did not respond to our request for comment.

While there are multiple facets to this partnership, one of the key elements is “Salesforce’s Agentforce, Data Cloud, and Customer 360 Apps will run on Google Cloud infrastructure, with access to new regions and simplified procurement through the Google Cloud Marketplace,” according to Salesforce.

The deal is a big win for Google Cloud, which sits in third place with around 12% of the cloud infrastructure market, especially given Salesforce has a pretty significant, long-standing relationship with Amazon too. Amazon leads the cloud infrastructure market with 30% share followed by Microsoft with 21%, a market that reached $330 billion in 2024, per Synergy Research. 

As John Dinsdale, chief analyst and research director at Synergy points out, if the deal is as described by Bloomberg, it probably won't have much impact on the market. "If you accept that $2.5 billion is a real number and then spread it over seven years, that is "only" around $360 million per year," he told FastForward. "That looks like a big number, but the worldwide market was $91 billion for the last quarter, and $330 billion for full-year 2024. It may well be a very important deal for a variety of reasons, but it is not going to materially shift the market share needle or cloud provider rankings."

Regardless, Holger Mueller, an analyst at Constellation Research, sees this deal as important for both companies for reasons that go beyond the cash value. “Salesforce needs access to a leading AI platform like Google's. It also needs to make Agentforce multimodal and make it available in one of the most plausible grounding services in Google Search, a service humans use all the time,” Mueller said. Multimodal means it can produce text, images, audio and video; while grounding refers to checking answers that the model provides against a trusted source.

As for Google, it needs workloads from SaaS vendors to monetize its AI investment. “Getting the Data Cloud support is critical as it's another proof point of data gravity and an initial hook for future customer spending,” he said.  He says it also simplifies things for joint customers. “AI in Agentforce gets better with more options, and it gets easier for Salesforce customers on Google Cloud to adopt Agentforce.”

Photo by Ron Miller