AI drives the growth of cloud computing for tech giants

Three of Wall Street’s tech giants, Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet, have reported impressive sales growth in their cloud computing units, fueled by the increasing interest in artificial intelligence (AI) among corporate customers. This surge in the $270 billion cloud infrastructure market indicates that AI investments are paying off, driving a rebound in spending.

Amazon’s cloud computing arm AWS saw a 17% growth in the first quarter, surpassing Wall Street’s 15% growth estimate and reaching a $100 billion annual run-rate for the first time. Similarly, Microsoft’s Azure and Google Cloud also exceeded expectations with growth rates of 31% and 28%, respectively.

Analysts attribute this growth to the dual impact of AI and accelerated cloud spending. D.A. Davidson & Co analyst Gil Luria noted, “AI is contributing to growth, but also the rest of cloud spending is accelerating.”

The industry’s focus on AI has been evident, with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella highlighting the increasing number of Azure AI customers and their growing average spend. Similarly, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai mentioned that over 60% of funded generative AI startups and nearly 90% of genAI unicorns were utilizing Google Cloud.

RBC Capital Markets analyst Rishi Jaluria emphasized the ongoing migration of workloads to the cloud and the consolidation of IT spending towards large platforms like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. These hyperscalers, with their extensive network of data centers and services, are becoming the preferred choice for end-to-end workload support.

Overall, the positive performance of these tech giants in the cloud computing space reflects the growing importance of AI and cloud technologies in driving business growth and innovation.