Cloud services continue to scale, a trend that continued into the second quarter. According to Synergy Research Group, second-quarter enterprise spending on cloud infrastructure services increased to almost $99 billion worldwide, up over $20 billion from the second quarter of 2024.
Putting aside the impact of significant currency fluctuations in the second quarter, the research firm said this is the third successive quarter of 24-25% year-on-year growth, with growth rates continuing to nudge upwards.
Driven by GenAI, cloud providers have seen quarterly revenues jump by $36 billion since the beginning of 2023.
“This is a good time to be a cloud provider. Despite being on the verge of becoming a hundred billion dollar per quarter market, cloud revenues are still growing by around 25% per year, and we are forecasting that average annual growth over the next five years will remain above 20%,” said John Dinsdale, a Chief Analyst at Synergy Research Group.
The AI factor
During the second-quarter 140-180%, GenAI-specific cloud services grew by 140-180%.
AI is also contributing to enhancements and added growth across the broader portfolio of cloud services.
Dinsdale noted that besides enterprise cloud services, “AI is also powering the expansion of revenues in other digital services. We are seeing strong double-digit growth in revenues from social media and search.”
Amazon’s lead continues
Amazon continues to hold onto its top spot in the market while Microsoft and Google continue to achieve higher growth rates with market shares of 30%, 20% and 13% respectively.
Synergy said this represents a recovery from 2023, when the growth rate averaged 19%.
On the Tier 2 front, CoreWeave, Oracle, Databricks and Huawei saw the most significant growth. Thanks to its AI and GPU services, CoreWeave is now achieving over a billion dollars in quarterly cloud revenue and is on the verge of breaking into the top twelve ranking of cloud providers.
Cloud revenue rising
Now that most of the cloud providers have released their second-quarter earnings, Synergy estimates that quarterly cloud infrastructure service revenues (including IaaS, PaaS, and hosted private cloud services) were $98.8 billion, with trailing twelve-month revenues reaching $366 billion.
Public IaaS and PaaS services account for the bulk of the market and those grew by 27% in the second quarter. Synergy said that the presence of major cloud providers is even more pronounced in public cloud, where the top three account for 68% of the market.
From a geographic point of view, the cloud market continues to grow strongly in all regions of the world. Countries with the strongest growth included Brazil, India, Australia, Indonesia, Ireland and Mexico, all growing at rates above the worldwide average.
However, the US remains by far the most significant cloud market, with its scale far surpassing the whole APAC region. The US market grew by 25% in the second quarter.
Finally, in Europe, the largest cloud markets are the UK and Germany, but the big markets with the highest growth rates were Ireland, Spain, and Italy.
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Sean Buckley
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