Big data is so important powerful nation states will fight over it, was the message from Alphabet's Eric Schmidt this week.

The value Google provides customers lies mostly in its tools for analysing this data, said the executive chairman of Alphabet, Google's parent company.

The firm is positioning itself as the champion of big data in the future via their Google Cloud Platform.

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Big data is so important powerful nation states will fight over it, was the message from Alphabet's Eric Schmidt (pictured) this week. The value Google provides customers lies in its tools for analysing this data, said the executive chairman of Alphabet

KEY QUOTES 'Big data is so powerful that nation states will fight over how much data matters'. 'I'll bet the rest of my professional career that the future of your business is big data and machine learning applied to the business opportunities, customer challenges, and things before you'. 'He who has the data can do the analytics and the algorithms ... the scale that we talked about will provide huge nation state benefits, in terms of global companies and benefits for their citizens, and so on.' Advertisement

Schmidt made the comments at the annual Google Cloud Next conference in San Francisco.

'I think big data is so powerful that nation states will fight over how much data matters,' he told attendees in his keynote speech.

'He who has the data can do the analytics and the algorithms ... the scale that we talked about will provide huge nation state benefits, in terms of global companies and benefits for their citizens, and so on.'

His argument was that it doesn't make sense for other companies to build their own data facilities when they can just rely on Google's cloud services.

Instead of building their own data centres, using Google Cloud allowed them to invest their energy in building the company, wrote Business Insider.

Citing Niantic's 'Pokémon Go' and Snapcat as two success stories, Schmidt told the crow that using Google's cloud services would allow them to rapidly scale up their companies.

'We have the references now,' Schmidt said, 'We're here for real.'

Citing Niantic's 'Pokémon Go' and Snapcat as two success stories, Eric Schmidt told the crow that using Google's cloud services would allow them to rapidly scale up their companies

'Just get to the cloud now,' he said. 'Just go there now. There's no time to waste any more', he said.

'I'll bet the rest of my professional career that the future of your business is big data and machine learning applied to the business opportunities, customer challenges, and things before you', he said.

According to RBC Capital Markets analyst Mark Mahoney, Google's cloud business was estimated to have an annual revenue of around $1 billion (£800 million).

Yesterday Google announced that it had bought Kaggle, which is home to the world's largest community of data scientists.

More than 800,000 data experts use Kaggle to explore, analyze and understand the latest updates in machine learning and data analytics.



