New data from Synergy Research Group revealed that global enterprise spending on cloud infrastructure services reached US$91 billion in Q4 2024, marking a 22 percent increase from the same quarter in 2023.
For the full year, the cloud market hit US$330 billion, up US$60 billion from 2023 and US$102 billion from 2022.
A key driver of this rapid expansion has been the rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI), which has accounted for half of the market's growth over the past two years, according to Synergy's analysis. The firm attributes this growth to a surge in new AI platform services, the expansion of graphics processing unit (GPU) as a service, and enhancements to existing cloud offerings.
In terms of market competition, Amazon Web Services (AWS) continues to lead with a 30 percent share, though Microsoft (21 percent) and Google (12 percent) saw higher percentage growth in Q4. Among the tier-two cloud providers experiencing the fastest growth include CoreWeave, Oracle, Snowflake, Cloudflare, and Databricks. CoreWeave has now entered the top 20 cloud providers, mainly due to its focus on AI and GPU services.
As most major cloud providers have reported their Q4 earnings, Synergy estimated that quarterly cloud revenue for IaaS, PaaS, and hosted private cloud services totalled US$90.6 billion, bringing the full-year revenue to US$330.4 billion. Public IaaS and PaaS services, which form the largest segment of the market, grew by 24 percent in Q4. The dominance of AWS, Microsoft, and Google is even more pronounced in the public cloud sector, where they collectively hold a 68 percent market share.
Regionally, cloud adoption continues to rise worldwide. In local currencies, the fastest-growing cloud markets in Q4 included Brazil, Spain, Italy, India, and Japan, surpassing the global average growth rate. The United States remains the largest cloud market, outpacing the entire Asia-Pacific region, with 23 percent growth in Q4. The UK and Germany lead in total cloud spending in Europe, while Ireland, Spain, and Italy posted the highest growth rates.
"Q4 was another strong quarter for cloud services, helping to drive a full-year growth rate that was four percentage points higher than 2023," said John Dinsdale, chief analyst at Synergy Research Group. "since ChatGPT was launched, GenAI has been responsible for at least half of the increase in cloud service revenues. That has come from either newly launched GenAI/GPU services or AI-driven improvements to existing cloud services."