Amazon, Microsoft, Google grab 63% of $42 bn Cloud infra market

The enterprise spending on cloud infrastructure services reached $42 billion in the second quarter (Q2), increased by $2.7 billion from the previous quarter and up 39 per cent from the second quarter of 2020, according to a new report.

Amazon’s worldwide market share nudged back up to 33 per cent. Microsoft and Google accounted for another 30 per cent of the market and the next 20 cloud providers combined had a 28 per cent market share, the data from Synergy Research Group showed.

“This market continues to be a runaway success story for Amazon, Microsoft, Google and some other cloud providers. You would not normally expect to see growth rates actually increasing in such a huge and rapidly developing market, yet once again that is what our research has shown,” said John Dinsdale, a Chief Analyst at Synergy Research Group.

Amazon, Microsoft and Google in aggregate are typically investing over $25 billion in capex per quarter, much of which is going towards building and equipping their fleet of over 340 hyperscale data centres.

“There remains a wealth of opportunity for smaller, more focused cloud providers, but it can be hard to look away from the eye-popping numbers coming out of the big three,” Dinsdale said in a statement.

For the fourth successive quarter, the year-on-year growth rate increased, which is unusual for such a large, high-growth market.

In previous quarters, Microsoft and Google had been slowly gaining ground on Amazon, but after achieving 10 per cent growth from the previous quarter, Amazon’s worldwide market share nudged back up to 33 per cent, the report noted.

Public IaaS and PaaS services account for the bulk of the market and those grew by 41 per cent in Q2.

“The dominance of the major cloud providers is even more pronounced in public cloud, where the top five control 80 per cent of the market. Geographically, the cloud market continues to grow strongly in all regions of the world,” the report informed.