Drone Racing League Inks Deal With Google Cloud, Launches 2022–23 DRL Algorand World Championship Season

The Drone Racing League (DRL) has announced a partnership with Google Cloud to reimagine a new era of tech-driven sports and win over the developers of tomorrow. Launching the 2022–23 DRL Algorand World Championship Season, DRL and Google Cloud will bring the first professional drone race to Silicon Valley and inspire dreamers, builders, and innovators everywhere to race drones using Google Cloud technology.

DRL Race in the Cloud Presented by Google Cloud
The DRL Race in the Cloud, presented by Google Cloud, will kick off the 2022-2023 racing season on Tuesday, October 11 at 7:30 p.m. PST at PayPal Park in San Jose, California. The event is open to the public with tickets available on Ticketmaster and will experience a thrilling, tech-driven sports competition featuring the world’s best drone pilots racing high-speed drones through an immersive neon-colored aerial course.

The race will be held on the opening night of Google Cloud Next, the annual conference where big thinking and technology converge to solve the challenges of tomorrow. Attendees at Next ’22 will have the opportunity to participate in the Google Cloud Fly Cup Challenge, a competition for developers to boost cloud skills and drive innovation into the sport of drone racing using Google’s secure, reliable, and scalable cloud platform. Participating developers will be able to utilize DRL’s race data to predict race outcomes and provide tips to DRL Pilots to enhance their season performance. The competition will launch today and run through the fall, and developers will have a chance to win an expenses-paid trip to the season finale of the DRL 2022-23 World Championship, where they will be celebrated on stage.

“Google Cloud and the Drone Racing League are globally recognized for technology innovation, progressive thinking, and making the future happen today. We are thrilled to partner with Google Cloud to engage their worldwide community of developers through our sport,” says DRL President Rachel Jacobson. “Together, we will launch our 2022–23 DRL Algorand World Championship Season with a spectacular drone race as part of Google Cloud’s marquee event of the year.”

DRL’s young, global “tech-setter” fans are more likely to be software developers, engineers, or work in key Information Technology positions than the general population.

“The Drone Racing League represents a new frontier of real-world tech-driven sports and games that can only be achieved with the scale and performance of the cloud,” says Anil Jain, global managing director of media and entertainment industry solutions at Google Cloud. “We look forward to collaborating with DRL through advanced AI/ML and data analytics capabilities that will allow the league to reimagine how they engage with and delight their millions of tech-savvy fans, who we are excited to welcome into the Google Cloud community of innovators.”

2022–23 DRL Alogrand World Championship Season
The 2022–23 DRL Algorand World Championship Season will start airing high-speed drone racing across all dimensions on November 19, 2022 at 1:30 p.m. EST on NBC, YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Doubling down on where Gen Z fans want to watch drone racing, DRL will expand its media distribution to top streaming platforms this season, including TikTok, where the league has 5 million followers.

The world’s 12 best drone pilots race high-speed drones through iconic sports arenas, DRL SIM virtual maps, and a metaverse world on the Algorand-blockchain to be crowned the DRL Algorand World Champion. The DRL race locations include: PayPal Park, home of MLS’ San Jose Earthquakes, and a championship in loanDepot Park, home to Major League Baseball’s Miami Marlins. Virtual courses in the DRL SIM game on Playstation, Xbox, Steam, and Epic Games include the U.S. Air Force Boneyard map.

DRL partners including Algorand, the leading high-performance blockchain platform, Google Cloud, TMobile, the U.S. Air Force, and Draganfly will activate throughout the season.