Public cloud infrastructure providers Amazon Web Services Inc. and Google LLC both announced new marquee customers today as they step up their battle capture big name clients.

AWS says it has agreed a deal with the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing to run its cloud-based machine learning and artificial intelligence workloads on its infrastructure. Meanwhile, Google said it’s teaming up with the Football Association of England, the governing body of English soccer, as the official cloud and data analytics partner for the England Teams and its center of technology excellence at St George’s Park.

The new clients might raise eyebrows since cloud computing capabilities aren’t normally considered a requirement for sporting success, but there are many ways in which the extra computing power offered by AWS and Google can benefit fans and participants alike.

NASCAR, for example, is planning to use AWS’ cloud capabilities to enhance its media coverage. One plan is to create a new video series called “This Moment in Nascar History,” recalling some of the great historical NASCAR races from years gone by.

That’s no easy undertaking, since the series will be based on a massive, 18-petabyte archive of video footage from previous NASCAR races. Rather than trawl through all of those archives manually, NASCAR will rely on Amazon’s Rekognition service to provide intelligent image and video analysis so it can easily surface old footage such as Denny Hamlin’s 2016 Daytona 500 photo finish.

Amazon Rekognition is just one service NASCAR will be taking advantage of. Others include Amazon SageMaker, which will be used to train deep learning models against 70 years of video footage to generate enhanced video analytics. NASCAR will also use AWS Media Services such as AWS Elemental MediaLive and AWS Elemental MediaStore to support NASCAR Drive, a new experience that allows fans to see what it’s like to sit in the driver’s seat, powered by in-car cameras, live audio and live leaderboards.

As for the English FA, its deal with Google will see it rely on G Suite to foster more collaboration between its team of soccer coaches. The idea is to share information via G Suite applications and use Hangouts as a communications tool, the FA said.

“The first step in our transformation at St George’s Park was to unify the way our coaches train and develop our 28 national teams to increase productivity,” says Craig Donald, chief information officer at The FA. “We needed the ability to collaborate and share across the coaches and team managers. G Suite allowed us to do that and was the first part of our Google Cloud partnership.”

The FA will also tap Google’s cloud services to explore the data it obtains from player’s performances during matches, and try to generate insights that coaches can use to improve their game. To do this, the FA Has created a proprietary software tool called the Player Profile System that measures the performance, fitness, training and form of England players at all levels.

“Smart analytics and data management plays a critical part for our PPS,” said Nick Sewell, head of application development at the FA. “Everything we do at St George’s Park for this workload is built on Google Cloud.”

Photo: NASCAR/Facebook