Google and its rivals are wielding a new weapon in the battle for cloud-computing market share: big-dollar investments in companies that agree to sign on to their services.
With Thomas Kurian serving as cloud chief executive since 2019 after a long tenure at Oracle Corp. , the Alphabet Inc. unit has been tapping its $142 billion treasure chest of cash to make it more attractive to customers. Google has taken equity stakes over the past year in companies including Univision Communications Inc. and CME Group Inc., in turn winning multiyear commitments to its cloud service worth as much as $1 billion or more.