Global cloud market sees another huge spending spree as AI demand continues

A representative abstraction of artificial intelligence
(Image credit: Shutterstock / vs148)

Cloud infrastructure spending is closing in on $80 billion spent per quarter, according to new figures that appear to confirm that Year-on-Year growth rate in the sector has now been north of 20% for three consecutive quarters.

Findings from Synergy Research (via The Register) also claim the total expenditure in the cloud market over the last twelve months totalled $297 billion.

Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google make up two-thirds of the cloud infrastructure market worldwide, and 73% of the public cloud market, with The Register noting all three regularly trade places for the top spot. 

Latest cloud share results

In Q2 2024, it’s AWS with a noticeable lead, with 32% market share - a 1% rise over the previous quarter. Microsoft Azure is in second place with 23%, a two percent decrease versus Q1

Google, though a firm third place, is maintaining its trend of slow gains on AWS, this time from a two percent rise to 13% share.

Outside of the top three, Synergy has found that larger gains are happening, with Alibaba seeing a 4% increase in share and Oracle and Salesforce three.

IBM, Tencent and Huawei battle it out on 2%, while Baidi, Fujitsu and VMware are among those with growth rounding up to 1%.

In a statement reported by The Register, Synergy Research Group Chief Analyst John Dinsdale did say that cloud growth was normalising, after heady bumps in the wake of artificial intelligence arising as a cottage industry.

Giving some idea as to the sheer scale of the market, Dinsdale said that “Oracle is now starting to separate itself to become a top five player”, but also that "in this market Google is almost five times the size of Oracle, while Amazon is almost three times the size of Google," he said.

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Luke Hughes
Staff Writer

 Luke Hughes holds the role of Staff Writer at TechRadar Pro, producing news, features and deals content across topics ranging from computing to cloud services, cybersecurity, data privacy and business software.

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