US vehicle manufacturing giants General Motors (GM) and Cruise are teaming up with Japan’s Honda Motors and Microsoft to bring self-driving vehicles to the cloud.

The partnership will see the three automaking behemoths leverage Microsoft’s flagship cloud and edge computing service, Azure, to scale the commercialisation of its self-driving vehicles.

GM Chairman and CEO, Mary Barra, described Microsoft’s involvement as “a great addition to the team”.

“Microsoft will help us accelerate the commercialization of Cruise’s all-electric, self-driving vehicles and help GM realize even more benefits from cloud computing as we launch 30 new electric vehicles globally by 2025 and create new businesses and services to drive growth,” she said.

Four parties have also come together in a new equity investment of more than $2 billion in Cruise, bringing the company’s valuation to a whopping $30 billion.

Cruise CEO Dan Ammann expressed delight at this collaboration. He says that the company’s mission to develop safer and better self-driving cars is not just a tech race, but also a “trust race”.

Cruise, as well as GM, have thenceforth also selected Microsoft as their preferred cloud provider to accelerate their digital transformation initiatives.