Cross-cloud · Azure to GCPUpdated 2026-06

Azure to GCP data transfer cost

Moving data from Azure to GCP costs Azure egress rates ($0.087/GB first 10 TB, Zone 1). GCP ingress is free. The reverse direction (GCP to Azure) costs GCP egress: $0.12/GB first 1 TB on Premium Tier, or $0.085/GB on Standard Tier. Azure ingress is free. There is no private-link discount on either side for cross-cloud traffic, so hyperscaler egress is the whole bill.

Sources: Azure bandwidth, GCP egress, GCP network tiers.

Per-volume cost: Azure to GCP (one-way)

Volume	Azure egress out	GCP ingress	Total
100 GB	$0 (free tier)	$0	$0
1 TB	$80.39 (924 GB billable)	$0	$80.39
10 TB	$882.18	$0	$882.18
100 TB	$7,867.56	$0	$7,867.56
1 PB	$56,202.36	$0	$56,202.36

Azure Zone 1 internet egress, after the 100 GB monthly free allowance. Excludes ExpressRoute on the Azure side and any Cloud Interconnect on the GCP side.

Per-volume cost: GCP to Azure (reverse)

Volume	GCP Premium	GCP Standard	Azure ingress
100 GB	$11.88	$0 (200 GiB free)	$0 (free)
1 TB	$122.76	$70.04	$0
10 TB	$1,136.52	$853.40	$0
100 TB	$8,509.32	$6,843.80	$0
1 PB	$84,203.40	$50,445.72	$0

GCP Standard Tier (200 GiB free, then $0.085 to 10 TiB, $0.065 to 150 TiB, $0.045 above) is the cheaper option for migration or replication traffic that is not latency-sensitive. Premium Tier holds at $0.08/GB above 10 TiB while Standard keeps falling, so the gap is widest at petabyte scale.

Which direction is cheaper

Azure to GCP is cheaper than GCP to Azure on Premium Tier at every volume, because Azure's entry rate ($0.087/GB) undercuts GCP Premium's ($0.12/GB) by about a quarter and the gap holds across the tiers. Against GCP Standard Tier the picture flips at scale: Standard's $0.085/GB entry rate already sits a hair under Azure's $0.087, and Standard's top band ($0.045/GB above 150 TiB) beats Azure's floor ($0.05/GB), so at 1 PB GCP-to-Azure on Standard ($50,445) is actually cheaper than Azure-to-GCP ($56,202).

The practical takeaway: if you control which side initiates the transfer, push from whichever cloud offers the cheaper egress for your volume, and on the GCP side always select Standard Tier for bulk data moves. The destination ingress is free on both clouds, so the egress side is the entire decision.

Operational note: Azure Cost Management records inbound transfer from GCP as zero-cost "data in", and GCP records inbound from Azure the same way. Neither console warns you about the other cloud's egress charge. For ongoing multi-cloud workloads, join both bills weekly so the egress line does not surprise you at month end.

Cost-reduction patterns

Always pick GCP Standard Tier for bulk moves

Standard Tier routes over the public internet to the edge nearest the source rather than Google's backbone. For migration and replication where latency is not user-facing, it saves 20 to 45 percent versus Premium Tier and beats Azure egress at petabyte scale.

Compress before transfer

zstd or gzip shrinks most JSON, log, and columnar data 60 to 80 percent. The CPU cost of compression is trivial against per-GB egress fees on either cloud.

Use appliance import for one-off migration

For a one-time move, Azure Data Box or Google Transfer Appliance ships the data physically with no per-GB egress. Often far cheaper than $7k+ in egress for 100 TB of internet transfer.

Replicate deltas, not full snapshots

For cross-cloud DR, use CDC tooling (Debezium, Airbyte, Datastream) to ship only writes. That typically cuts ongoing transfer 70 to 95 percent versus nightly full copies.

Bridge through Cloudflare R2

R2 has zero egress. Push from Azure or GCP to R2 once, then pull from the other cloud for free. Adds a hop and R2 storage cost but breaks the per-GB hyperscaler egress bill on the read side.

Colocate via ExpressRoute and Cloud Interconnect

If both clouds peer into the same colo (Equinix, Megaport), route the transfer over private links instead of internet egress. Cuts the per-GB rate sharply at sustained volume, though port and circuit fees apply.