GCP – AI-driven growth: AppLovin’s journey amplified by Google Cloud

AppLovin makes technologies that help businesses of every size connect to their ideal customers. The company provides end-to-end software leveraging AI solutions for businesses to reach, monetize and grow their global audiences. AppLovin has been exploring and harnessing AI for product and service enhancements across their ad platform to improve user experience across operations such as monetization, and making effective data-driven marketing decisions.

AppLovin achieved increased automation in critical operations — ad targeting, bid setting, learning phases, and more — that were traditionally reliant on manual adjustments by their team or partners. However, AppLovin encountered a notable challenge: implementing AI, from managing training workloads to processing billions of automated recommendations daily, requires a robust cloud infrastructure. To overcome this challenge, AppLovin upgraded the infrastructure supporting its AI advertising algorithm using the latest, top-of-the-line hardware, including Google Cloud G2 VMs. One of AppLovin’s goals was to modernize its AdTech platform by leveraging Google’s state-of-the-art cloud technology and infrastructure; they were able to achieve this vision and accelerate their AI development timeline.

In 2022, AppLovin was in the middle of a large-scale migration to Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) to ease the strain on their legacy infrastructure, reduce latency and improve their ability to scale effortlessly. AppLovin began testing G2, the industry’s first cloud VM powered by NVIDIA L4 Tensor Core GPUs, at the beginning of 2023. G2 was specifically built to handle large inference AI workloads like those AppLovin was dealing with, making it an ideal solution.

Leveraging G2 VMs and GKE together, they were able to:

Improve automation and consistency across their application stackReduce training time by leveraging GPU hardwareAchieve the agility and flexibility to launch in new regions at will

By switching from NVIDIA T4 GPUs to G2 VMs, powered by Nvidia L4 GPUs, AppLovin experienced up to a 4x improvement in performance. Additionally, their switch from NVIDIA A10G GPUs to G2 VMs lowered production infrastructure costs by as much as 40%.

“With Google Cloud’s leading infrastructure and GPUs, AppLovin is able to achieve nearly 2x improved price/performance compared with industry alternatives and support the company’s AI techniques developments,” said Omer Hasan, Vice President of Operations, AppLovin.

And, as they’ve moved their advertisers seamlessly to new systems, they’ve been able to pass the benefits of these changes right along to their customers.

Peak Games, for example, describes “substantial growth in ROAS campaigns with AppLovin… with the recent AI advancements.” And DealDash has stated that “[AppLovin’s] AI-powered campaigns and unparalleled support have helped us achieve remarkable efficiency.”

From startup to just getting started

AppLovin may not be a startup anymore – the company went public in April 2021 and using its tools, its customers have achieved more than 16 billion installs (on more than two billion mobile devices) in 130 countries – but its desire to retain a disruptive edge is abundantly clear.

At Next ‘23 Basil Shikin, Chief Technology Officer at AppLovin, shared that he believes “Google was a force multiplier in creating our culture of innovation at AppLovin.” He also stated that,“with the help of Google Cloud’s engine, AppLovin will be able to remain on the forefront of that evolution.”

Omer Hasan, Vice President of Operations at AppLovin, has even directly credited the role of Google’s ongoing innovation in upgrading their core tools: “Because of Google Cloud’s deep commitment to AI technologies, the advancements in our platform, AXON 2.0, were made possible.”

He goes on to say that “we saw really incredible improvements on our team’s agility, our ability to respond to the environment, and updating our training models as fast as possible.”

What’s next?

AppLovin has achieved impressive growth since their establishment in 2012 with annual ad spend exceeding $3.5 billion and over 2.5 million requests per second. This growth has been fueled by their core values of “Move Fast” and “Never Stop Learning” putting them on the forefront of the AI revolution in adtech.

AppLovin continues to leverage AI techniques in its industry-leading products. Scalability, efficiency, and value are essential to the business as they continue to add developers to their customer base, and as their existing customers are emboldened to amp up their advertising efforts.

“We love to iterate, and we love to change. Moving all of our machine learning/AI away from static deployments into an autoscale GKE environment, coupled with the introduction of GPUs, allowed for rapid scaling,” said Omer Hasan, AppLovin Vice President of Operations. “With that elastic infrastructure in place, it became a lot easier to deploy quickly, reliably, and consistently.”

In their relentless pursuit of growth and innovation, AppLovin is harnessing the power of Google Cloud’s security solutions. With a foundation built on Google infrastructure, integrating GKE, Vertex AI, and BigQuery, they’re forging ahead securely, achieving unprecedented speed, scale, and endless possibilities.

The recent implementation of NVIDIA L4 GPUs is a testament to their commitment to future-proofing, demonstrating that for AppLovin, they’re only just getting started when it comes to scaling and reaching new heights of success.