Shopify powered over $14.6B in sales on Black Friday weekend with Google Cloud

Google Cloud Results

Processed $14.6B in global sales, a 27% increase YoY, during Black Friday weekend
136M packages globally tracked using the Shop App built on Compute Engine’s Z-series backed storage
489M requests per minute at peak traffic
2.2T edge requests handled in one weekend

Shopify uses Google Cloud to process $14.6B in Black Friday weekend sales without compromising speed and reliability for 81M buyers.

A cloud built for peak demand

Shopify powers millions of businesses across more than 175 countries. From independent entrepreneurs to global brands, merchants rely on the platform to stay available whenever customers might shop.

But modern commerce doesn’t move in predictable patterns. Traffic can spike within seconds, and events like Black Friday or Cyber Monday can push infrastructure to its limits. Traditional, static environments often require costly overprovisioning just to survive peak demand.

Shopify needed a different model, built for extreme variability and engineered for reliability at scale. It was through this lens that Shopify began evaluating cloud providers.

For Shopify, alignment on engineering philosophy mattered as much as raw infrastructure capacity. The company wanted a partner that could scale instantly during unpredictable traffic surges while maintaining performance and availability across globally distributed regions.

We chose Google because we needed a partner who could understand and support hyper-scale reliability engineering. We didn’t just need servers; we needed a platform built on SRE principles similar to our own. Google global network performance and the maturity of Kubernetes were decisive factors.

Mattie Toia

VP of Infrastructure, Shopify

“We chose Google because we needed a partner who could understand and support hyper-scale reliability engineering,” says Mattie Toia, VP of Infrastructure at Shopify. “We didn’t just need servers; we needed a platform built on SRE principles similar to our own. Google’s global network performance combined with the workload-optimized nature of the compute engine and maturity of Kubernetes alongside the organization that knew how to scale them were decisive factors.”

Compute, Kubernetes, and AI at global scale

Shopify’s migration to Google Cloud began in 2016 as a move away from its own data centers. The initial phase focused on lifting and shifting key components. Over time, that effort evolved into a deeper replatforming toward cloud-native services and performance-optimized infrastructure.

Our challenge with AI workloads was scaling them efficiently to power features like ‘Shopify Magic’ and our ‘Sidekick’ AI assistant for millions of users. We used Google’s accelerator-optimized VMs to take these workloads from PoC to production.

Mattie Toia

VP of Infrastructure, Shopify

Today, Shopify runs a broad mix of workloads across Google Cloud to balance performance, elasticity, and cost efficiency. Core commerce services operate on Compute Engine using N2 and N4 machine families for general-purpose workloads, alongside C4 instances powering services such as Shop App catalogue search. Shopify has also built a distributed global-scale database layer on Compute Engine’s Z-series machines, which provide high-performance local storage. The Shop App built on Compute Engine’s Z-series storage optimized family tracks the delivery of packages globally in real-time. Microservices use Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) for container orchestration that scales instantly during traffic spikes. Custom machine types allow teams to optimize CPU-to-memory ratios based on workload needs.

Storage architecture plays an equally critical role. Shopify uses Persistent Disk for general workloads and Hyperdisk Balanced and Extreme for high-performance databases.

AI introduced a new layer of complexity. “Our challenge with AI workloads was scaling them efficiently to power features like ‘Shopify Magic’ and our ‘Sidekick’ AI assistant for millions of users,” says Toia. “We used Google’s accelerator-optimized VMs to take these workloads from PoC to production.”

Classic compute workloads on GKE interact with AI services through internal APIs, while Hyperdisk ensures high-throughput data delivery. The result is a unified platform where core commerce systems, analytics pipelines, and AI capabilities operate on the same elastic foundation.

Peak commerce without compromise

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are the ultimate stress test for global commerce infrastructure. In 2025, Shopify merchants generated a record-breaking $14.6 billion in sales during the Black Friday—Cyber Monday weekend. At peak, sales reached $5.1 million per minute, with traffic surging to 489 million requests per minute at the edge.

Behind the scenes, Shopify’s Google Cloud infrastructure absorbed extraordinary scale:

2.2 trillion edge requests
14.8 trillion database queries
1.75 trillion database writes
136M packages globally tracked

“Google Cloud is now the foundation for our entire platform,” says Toia. By eliminating infrastructure as a constraint, Shopify gives merchants confidence that peak opportunity will never be limited by platform reliability. Flash sales, viral campaigns, even global expansion—it can all happen without hesitation.

“The adoption of Google Cloud infrastructure has had a profound and quantifiable impact on Shopify’s business, fundamentally enabling our growth from a national player to a global commerce operating system,” says Toia. “The most critical business impact is the unshakable reliability we can offer our merchants.”

The adoption of Google Cloud infrastructure has had a profound and quantifiable impact on Shopify’s business, fundamentally enabling our growth from a national player to a global commerce operating system. The most critical business impact is the unshakable reliability we can offer our merchants.

Mattie Toia

VP of Infrastructure, Shopify

At global scale, reliability is revenue. And at over $14.6B processed in a single weekend, Shopify’s platform proved it can deliver both.

Shopify is a leading global commerce company that provides tools to start, grow, and manage retail businesses of any size, powering millions of merchants in more than 175 countries.