New York (CNN Business) Google and its parent company Alphabet (GOOGL) are making a multi-billion bet on the cloud.

Google said Thursday that it has agreed to acquire Looker , a business intelligence platform, for $2.6 billion in cash to bolster its cloud computing division by providing customers with more powerful data analytics.

"Google Cloud is being used by many of the leading organizations in the world for analytics and decision-making," Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, said in a statement Thursday. "The combination of Google Cloud and Looker will enable customers to harness data in new ways to drive their digital transformation."

Oracle ORCL It's Google's biggest acquisition since Kurian, a formerexecutive, was hired late last year to oversee the Google Cloud unit. Kurian previously said Google Cloud would be "competing much more aggressively" under his leadership as it vies for a bigger piece of the fast-growing cloud computing market.

Amazon AMZN Microsoft MSFT At the moment,andare generally seen as the two leaders in the market, with the success of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Azure, respectively. AWS brought in more than $25 billion in revenue in 2018. Alphabet does not break out cloud revenue.

Read More