PayPal Holdings Inc. is betting on Google Cloud’s infrastructure to support its continued growth and will expand the use of that company’s services to accelerate its digital transformation plans.

Google LLC said today it will provide PayPal with expanded cloud resources in order to help it process transactional data at massive scale.

PayPal, which forged its relationship with Google Cloud way back in 2016, and said today it will move even more of its core infrastructure and workloads to the platform as part of its wider hybrid cloud strategy. It said it’s doing this because of a surge in digital commerce and user traffic over the last year that has led to a 24% spike in its total number of active customer accounts.

PayPal said Google Cloud’s infrastructure has enabled it to add the capacity it needs to support its growth in a matter of hours, a process that would have taken months had it tried to do so alone. The company runs the bulk of its online transactional data in a SAP S/4HANA database that’s hosted on Google Cloud in order to process transactions at high volume while analyzing trends with extremely low latency.

At peak traffic times such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the U.S., the company was processing as many as 1,000 payments per second, it said, a 22% increase from one year before. PayPal said it was only able to do this thanks to Google’s ability to stagger workloads and scale compute resources up or down as required.

“We can only develop fast, build fast, and deploy fast if we have infrastructure that’s as nimble as we are,” said Wes Hummel, vice president of site reliability and cloud engineering at PayPal.

The close relationship between the two companies works both ways. Google recently added support for PayPal as a payment method on Google Workspace and Google Ads in the U.S. and some European countries. PayPal has long been a supported payment method on Google’s app store, Google Play.

Google has announced a string of major customer wins in recent months, and the expanded relationship with PayPal comes just days after it landed a major contract to host Vodafone Group Plc’s big data and business analytics workloads. In April, the pizza delivery firm Papa John’s International Inc. also agreed a multiyear deal to use Google’s cloud infrastructure.

Photo: Marco Verch/Flickr