Google Cloud chalked up higher growth rate in 2022 than AWS and Microsoft, Gartner data shows

Google Cloud achieved higher growth on a year-over-year (YoY) basis between 2021 and 2022 than the other top four public cloud firms, Gartner’s latest global infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) market tracker data shows.

The IT analyst giant’s shows while Amazon Web Services (AWS) continues to lead the public cloud market, with 40% share, fourth place Google has a 7.5% share but grew by 41% between 2021 and 2022.

“Google saw the highest growth rate of the top five IaaS vendors, growing 41% in 2022 to reach over $9bn in revenue,” said Gartner, in a statement. “Google’s increased investment in sovereign cloud and expanded sales and marketing partner programmes helped to broaden its customer base and drive additional IaaS revenue.”

AWS, meanwhile, achieved a 36% growth rate over the same period, while second place Microsoft has a 21.5% share of the market and recorded 35% YoY growth.

Chinese cloud giant Alibaba is in fourth place with 7.7% share, but achieved the lowest amount of YoY growth at just 2.4%.

And despite several of the public cloud giants reporting a softening in demand for their services during the latter portion of 2022, Sid Nag, vice-president analyst at Gartner, said the IaaS market performed better than expected overall last year.  

“IaaS growth in 2022 was stronger than expected, despite a slight softening in the fourth quarter as customers focused on using their previously committed capacity to its fullest potential,” said Nag.

“This is expected to continue until mid-2023 and is a natural outcome of the market’s maturity. We expect an acceleration in 2024, as there is still room for plenty of additional future growth.”

IT spending in the global IaaS market topped $100bn for the first time in 2022, and reached $120.3bn by the end of the year, and grew by 29.7% overall. The previous year, there was $92.8bn spent on IaaS.  

And the demand for IaaS is fuelling the growth of other categories of cloud services, continued Nag. “IaaS is driving more software-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service growth as buyers continue to add more applications to the cloud and modernise existing ones.”

Nag predicted what factors are likely to fuel demand for IaaS services in the future, with the rising popularity of tools such as ChatGPT likely to play a part.  

“Generative AI will continue to drive the cloud market forward, particularly as hyperscalers look to support offerings beyond the existing, democratised generative AI solutions,” said Nag.

“As enterprises integrate generative AI into their technology portfolio, new markets and opportunities for cloud hyperscalers will emerge related to sovereignty, ethics, privacy and sustainability.”