Cloud Infrastructure Market Sees Strong Q4 Growth as More Companies Buy In

By Thomas Price | Thursday, 11 February 2021 | Tech, Finance

As the data a company or business collects begins to grow, the need to offload storage into a system that takes the strain off of internal storage capacity has become necessary, especially as the business begins to scale up. This demand has created an even larger need for strong cloud infrastructure, considering the cloud still represents the best way to store data while maintaining security of that information. As a result, many companies have increased their own spending on cloud services, pushing the cloud infrastructure market to new heights. With the release of the Q4 spending and results, it has become clear that the cloud infrastructure market is growing rapidly and that the money put toward that market is growing as well.

Cloud Infrastructure Market in 2020

In 2019, the cloud infrastructure market generated about $97 billion in revenue. That figure has changed significantly over the past year, with the market in 2020 bringing in an impressive $129 billion. Adding to this incredible rise to $129 billion in revenue is the relatively short period of time it took to reach this point. In fact, it only took nine fiscal quarters to double in size. These growth figures continued into the final quarter of 2020 as well, with companies of all kinds continuing to spend more and more on the market.

In fact, in Q4 of 2020, a whopping $39.9 billion was spent on the cloud infrastructure market. The money spent represents a 10% or $4 billion rise from Q3 in 2020 and an unbelievable 35% rise in comparison to the same quarter in 2019. The majority of this spending went to the three largest companies in the cloud infrastructure market: Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.

Amazon Web Services fell slightly short of expectations in Q4; however, even less than anticipated revenue is still a massive number for the cloud section of Amazon’s business. In fact, the company’s cloud infrastructure section reported $12.7 billion. Microsoft, whose cloud services business is known as Azure, saw revenues grow by 23%, surpassing $14.6 billion in 2020 during that process. As for Google, the search engine company saw $3.83 billion in revenue from Google Cloud, totaling $13.1 billion in the year. This was a marked increase from 2019 of 46%.

Cloud Infrastructure Market Share

As for market share, Amazon and Microsoft top the list by a large margin, though there are several businesses that have influence. Amazon’s market share has remained above 30%, an impressive feat considering how many companies are trying to build traction within the industry. Microsoft has also begun making up serious ground as Azure continues to attract new business, finally reaching a 20% market share. No single individual business outside of Microsoft and Amazon have a market share above 10%.

With that being said, businesses such as Google, IBM, and Alibaba all still represent billions of dollars of revenue each year. Especially as the market continues to grow and more companies start creating new business, the cloud infrastructure market looks set for the near future.

About the Author

Thomas Price

Tom Price is a writer focusing on Entertainment and Sports Features. He has a degree from NYU in English with a minor in Creative Writing. He has been previously published for Washington Square News, Dignitas, CBR, and Numbers on the Boards.