Spending on cloud infrastructure services jumped 51% from the first quarter in 2017,
according to new data from Synergy Research Group, easily beating the growth rates achieved in the previous five quarters.
The growth was paced by market leader Amazon and its Amazon Web Services (AWS), which holds 33% of the market share. In Q1 2018, AWS achieved its largest growth since late 2016. Microsoft, Google, and Alibaba have all substantially grown their market shares, though that growth has come at the expense of smaller cloud operators and not Amazon.
Synergy estimates that quarterly cloud infrastructure service revenues are now at nearly $15 billion.
“Cloud growth in the last two quarters really has been quite exceptional,” said John Dinsdale, a Chief Analyst and Research Director at Synergy Research Group. “Normal market development cycles and the law of large numbers should result in growth rates that slowly diminish – and that is what we saw in late 2016 and through most of 2017. But the growth rate jumped by three percentage points in Q4 and by another five in Q1. That is good news for the leading cloud providers, whose historically high levels of capex are helping to ensure that they are the main beneficiaries of that exceptional market growth.”