Enterprise cloud infrastructure uptake shows no sign of slowing
Enterprise spending on cloud infrastructure reached a record $143 billion in the second quarter of 2026, growing 43 per cent year on year at its fastest rate for eight years. The acceleration is largely attributed to demand for AI services, alongside organisations’ continuing need for flexible, scalable IT, and indicates that the cloud market has doubled after 11 consecutive quarters of faster growth.
Synergy Research estimates cloud infrastructure revenue totalled $500 billion over the preceding 12 months, with public IaaS and PaaS growing 47 per cent in the quarter and AI-specific cloud services rising 165 per cent. AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud generated 67 per cent of quarterly revenue between them; AWS held 28 per cent of the market, followed by Microsoft on 20 per cent and Google on 15 per cent, while the US market grew 49 per cent.
- Cloud infrastructure spending hit $143 billion in Q2 2026.
- AI services are driving much of the market’s acceleration.
- AWS, Microsoft and Google remain dominant.
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Cloud infrastructure is the computing power, data storage and software platforms that organisations rent over the internet instead of running entirely on their own equipment. It allows businesses and public bodies to add or reduce capacity as their needs change, and is widely used for websites, apps, databases and internal systems.
The main types are infrastructure as a service, which provides basic computing and storage, and platform as a service, which provides tools for building and running applications. Demand has also risen as organisations use artificial intelligence, which often needs large amounts of specialised computing power.
Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud are the largest providers, with most of the global market between them. Their scale matters because cloud spending is now a major part of technology budgets and can influence how quickly organisations adopt new digital and AI-based services.