According to E-Week, “Google is donating 50 million hours of cloud computing time to the U.S. government to assist in a recently announced Climate Data Initiative that aims to help organizations and communities use public data to look at climate conditions in their areas.”

Google will provide 50 million hours of high-performance computing on the “Google Earth Engine” geospatial analysis platform.  Earth Engine brings together the world’s satellite imagery with tools to help detect changes and map trends on the Earth’s surface.

This year marks the start of a trend: The donation of cloud services to worthy organizations.  High visibility donations provide good PR for the cloud provider, and obviously benefit the government or non-profit organizations as well.  It will be interesting to see what comes from these types of partnerships.  Other donation sectors include health data analysis and systems that provide logistics for moving supplies to third world countries.

The reality is that the donators only provide excess and typically unutilized capacity, so this is not a stretch for them to provide the services.  However, they should still get the credit.