By: Basel Khaled
While the incentives of the COVID-19 mass migration online are long gone, the impact of widespread digitalization and the ongoing artificial intelligence (AI) boom are more than evident in the stellar growth of cloud infrastructure and the sector’s key providers.
Finbold found that, as of the first quarter (Q1) of 2024, the two biggest players in the industry - Amazon (AMZN) and Microsoft (MSFT) - command as much as 56% of the global cloud infrastructure market.
Additionally, Microsoft Azure has been increasingly gaining on AWS as, in the last three years, its market share rose from 21% to 25%, while Amazon’s diminished from 33% to 41%.
Azure’s rise can, to a significant extent, be attributed to Microsoft’s focus on novel technologies such as machine learning and AI, as exemplified by the early investment in OpenAI - the company behind ChatGPT.
Cloud infrastructure market continues consolidating at the top
The market has also seen some consolidation at the top in the last three years, with both Alibaba (BABA) and IBM (IBM) seeing their market share drop. The former’s from 6% in late 2021 to 4% in early 2024, and the latter’s from 4% to 2%.
Other major players - Salesforce (CRM), Tencent (0700), and Oracle (ORCL) - have all stagnated. Nonetheless, as Andreja Stojanovic, a co-author of the research, pointed out:“However, it is worth pointing out that the loss of market share does not mean that the companies have seen a reduction in their business, given that the entire cloud infrastructure market’s revenue has grown from just above $50 billion in Q4 2021 to over $76 billion in Q1 2024.”
Still, once Microsoft Azure is excluded, only Alphabet’s (GOOGL) Google Cloud saw its market share rise between Q4, 2021, and Q1, 2024 and even then only by 1%.
