Synergy Research Group has released its latest data on business trends in the cloud computing market. The three major companies involved in the lucrative business are racking up huge amounts of money, aided "in no small part" by the hype surrounding generative AI services.
During the first quarter of 2024, enterprise organizations spent "well over" $76 billion on cloud infrastructure worldwide. Market data company Synergy Research Group estimates that the cloud market grew by 21 percent compared to the first quarter of 2023, experiencing the second consecutive quarter of "markedly improved" growth and the strongest performance since the third quarter of 2022.
Despite suffering some economic, currency, and political headwinds, the cloud computing industry is showing its "underlying strength" and reaping the benefits of the generative AI explosion, Synergy writes. Amazon, Microsoft and Google kept their position as the Big Three in the cloud business while experiencing significant growth rates.
Amazon retains its lead with a 31 percent share of the market, while Microsoft (25 percent) and Google (11 percent) enjoyed stronger year-over-year growth rates. "Tier two" cloud providers with the highest YoY performance include Huawei, Snowflake, MongoDB, and Oracle. Chinese company Huawei keeps growing and doing a lot of business despite dealing with harsh sanctions imposed by the US government.
After incorporating the earnings results shared by the major cloud providers for Q1 2024, Synergy is now estimating that revenues coming from cloud infrastructure spending were $76.5 billion. The market reached an estimated value of $283 billion during the past twelve months. Synergy's "cloud infrastructure" definition includes IaaS, PaaS, and hosted private cloud services.
Public IaaS and PaaS services took the largest part of the entire cloud market in the past three months, with a growth rate of 23 percent. Major providers are showing a dominant position in the public cloud business, with the top three names controlling 72 percent of the market. Growth is strong in all parts of the world, but the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region had the best performance, with India, Japan, Australia, and South Korea growing by 25 percent year-over-year.
Compared to APAC countries, the US market grew by 20 percent in Q1. According to Synergy chief analyst John Dinsdale, the cloud market experienced some "abnormally low" growth rates during late 2022 and 2023. The business has now bounced back as analysts predicted, though the market has become 'too massive' to return to the post-pandemic rapid growth rates. Cloud spending will double in size over the next four years nonetheless.