After record $50 billion quarter, Cloud firms face chip constraints

Driven by remote working and learning, the global Cloud infrastructure services increased 35 per cent to record $49.4 billion in revenues in the third quarter (Q3) this year. However, the impact of the global chip shortage is imminent in the upcoming quarters.

Cloud services spending is still being affected by the digital transformation efforts required to maintain business continuity during the pandemic-related disruptions, according to a report by market research firm Canalys.

In response, the major cloud services providers have emphasised geographic data centre expansion to meet the rising demand.

“Overall compute demand is out-growing chip manufacturing capabilities, and infrastructure expansion may become limited for the cloud service providers,” said research analyst Blake Murray.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) accounted for 32 per cent of total cloud infrastructure services spend in Q3 2021, making it the leading cloud service provider.

Microsoft Azure was the second largest cloud service provider in Q3, with a 21 per cent market share

Google Cloud was the third largest provider and grew 54 per cent to account for 8 per cent of the market.

“Besides managing supply chains to the best of their abilities, the providers building an advantage are focused on developing their go-to-market channels along with their product portfolios to catch up with an increasingly wide variety of customer use cases that has fuelled demand since the start of the pandemic,” Murray explained.

The impact of the global chip shortage is imminent, as data centre component providers are seeing longer lead times and higher prices that will be passed on to the largest providers.

“The hyper scalers have now shifted focus to advancing industry-specific service portfolios and growing their channels to successfully bring these increasingly diverse sets of products to market,” the report mentioned.