Quarterly Cloud Spending Blows Past $30B; Incremental Growth Continues

New data from Synergy Research Group released July 30 shows that second quarter spending on cloud infrastructure services passed the $30 billion milestone, an increase of an impressive $7.5 billion from the second quarter of 2019. 

This continues the trend of ever-larger increments in cloud spending. Q2 2019 spending grew $6.5 billion from Q2 2018, which in turn grew $5.5 billion from Q2 2017. 

Amazon Web Services’ market share remained at its long-standing mark of around 33%, while Microsoft Azure was at 18% for the third consecutive quarter and Google Cloud’s share nudged up to 9%. In aggregate, Chinese cloud providers now account for more than 12% of the worldwide market, led by Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu. 

The top eight cloud providers now account for 77% of the worldwide market. They are followed by a long tail of small providers or large companies with a minor position in the cloud market, Synergy reported.

With most of the major cloud providers having now released their earnings data for Q2, Synergy estimates that quarterly cloud infrastructure service revenues (including IaaS, PaaS and hosted private cloud services) were almost $30.5 billion, with trailing 12-month revenues reaching $111 billion.

Public IaaS and PaaS services account for the bulk of the market, and those grew by 34% in Q2. The dominance of the top five providers is even more pronounced in public cloud, where they control almost 80% of the market. Geographically, the cloud market continues to grow strongly in all regions of the world.

“As far as cloud market numbers go, it’s almost as if there were no COVID-19 pandemic raging around the world. As enterprises struggle to adapt to new norms, the advantages of public cloud are amplified,” John Dinsdale, chief analyst at Synergy Research Group, said in a media advisory. 

“The percentage growth rate is coming down, as it must when a market reaches enormous scale, but the incremental growth in absolute dollar terms remains truly impressive. The market remains on track to grow by well over 30% in 2020.”

Reno, Nev.-based Synergy provides quarterly market sizing and segmentation data on cloud and related markets, including company revenues by segment and by region.