San Francisco, May 13 (IANS): Google on Thursday announced that it has joined hands with the Elon Musk-run SpaceX to use the space company's growing satellite Internet service -- Starlink -- with its cloud unit.

Under this partnership, SpaceX will begin to locate Starlink ground stations within Google data centre properties, enabling the secure, low-latency and reliable delivery of data from more than 1,500 Starlink satellites launched to orbit to date to locations at the network edge via Google Cloud.

"Applications and services running in the cloud can be transformative for organisations, whether they are operating in a highly networked or remote environment," Urs Holzle, Senior Vice President, Infrastructure at Google Cloud, said in a statement.

"We are delighted to partner with SpaceX to ensure that organisations with distributed footprints have seamless, secure and fast access to the critical applications and services they need to keep their teams up and running," Holzle added.

Google Cloud's high-capacity private network will support the delivery of Starlink's global satellite Internet service, bringing businesses and consumers seamless connectivity to the cloud and Internet and enabling the delivery of critical enterprise applications to virtually any location.

"Combining Starlink's high-speed, low-latency broadband with Google's infrastructure and capabilities provides global organisations with the secure and fast connection that modern organisations expect," said Gwynne Shotwell, President and Chief Operating Officer, SpaceX.

"We are proud to work with Google to deliver this access to businesses, public sector organisations, and many other groups operating around the world,"

This new capability, delivered by Google Cloud and Starlink to enterprise customers, is expected to be available in the second half of 2021.