Cloud Big Three take lion's share as market expands 21%

The global cloud market showed strong growth for the first quarter of this year, with the big three providers continuing to consolidate their stranglehold over this vital area of IT services.

Enterprise spending on cloud infrastructure services topped $76 billion during Q1 2024, up by $13.5 billion, or a 21 percent increase compared with the same period last year.

These figures come from Synergy Research Group, which said this is the second consecutive quarter in which the year-on-year growth rate has notably improved, with Q1 seeing the strongest growth since Q3 of 2022.

"We forecast that growth rates would bounce back and that is what we are now seeing," said Synergy Chief Analyst John Dinsdale.

However, as The Register has noted before, cloud services never actually stopped growing, unlike some other sectors of the IT industry. They may have shown slower than previous growth, but still continued to expand in value.

Synergy estimates that the total cloud infrastructure service revenues were $76.5 billion, with public cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) accounting for the majority of the market.

Those public services (Iaas and PaaS) grew by 23 percent during the quarter, while total cloud revenues for the past 12 months are estimated to be $283 billion.

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The three biggest cloud providers – Amazon's AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud – now account for 67 percent of the entire global cloud spend. Amazon still retains its lead at 31 percent, but its share is shrinking compared with Microsoft (25 percent) and Google (11 percent), which showed the stronger year-on-year growth, according to Synergy.

For public cloud services, the triumvirate has an even greater share, accounting for 72 percent of the market during Q1. Meanwhile, the second tier of cloud players saw the strongest year-on-year growth rates from Huawei, Snowflake, MongoDB, and Oracle.

By region, the US remains by far the largest cloud market, and this grew by 20 percent during the quarter. However, the APAC region showed the strongest growth, with India, Japan, Australia and South Korea all growing in cloud revenue by 25 percent or more compared with the same quarter last year.

"We will not return to the growth rates seen prior to 2022, as the market has become too massive to grow that rapidly, but we will see the market continue to expand substantially," commented Dinsdale.

In fact, Synergy forecasts that the global cloud market will double in size over the next four years. ®