Candy Crush creator King, the London-headquartered gaming colossus, is moving its core data infrastructure and AI/ML platform to Google Cloud Platform (GCP), the company – which has 270 million monthly active users  – announced this morning.

The mobile gaming company, which owns franchises Candy Crush, Farm Heroes, Pet Rescue and Bubble Witch among 200+ other games, has one of Europe’s largest Hadoop clusters, with a double-digit number of petabytes online.

In a joint statement, CIO Jacques Erasmus and FVP Technology Åsa Bredin said: “In the last couple of years, we started to ask ourselves whether a monolithic on-premise Hadoop environment best set us up for the challenges of the future, particularly in a world where public cloud is becoming an ever-greater part of the IT landscape and – especially important for us – when much of the innovation in data science and data engineering is now taking place in public cloud.”

Move Will “Amplify Our Engineers’ Efforts”

Saying that a number of King’s teams had started to do more work with machine learning and AI, the two said they believe the move to GCP “will amplify our own talented engineers’ efforts… and areas of effort where King needs unique capabilities not provided by the market.”