Worldwide spending on cloud infrastructure services reached $143.4 billion in the second quarter of 2026, up roughly 43% year on year, according to Synergy Research Group. Three providers hold most of it: AWS at 28%, Microsoft Azure at 20% and Google Cloud at a record 15% — 63% between them. A year earlier Synergy had AWS at 30% and Google Cloud at 13%.
For a business choosing where to run its systems, the interesting part is not the league table. It is what a market this concentrated does to your options.
What concentration means for a buyer
The defaults are strong, and they are not neutral. When three providers hold nearly two thirds of the market, most tools, tutorials and job candidates assume one of them. That is a real advantage: hiring is easier, problems are already answered somewhere, integrations exist. It is also how a technical decision becomes a commercial dependency.
Growth is being driven by AI infrastructure, not by your web app. The 43% quarterly growth is not ordinary business workloads expanding. It is capacity being built for AI services. Two things follow: capacity in popular regions can be tight, and the prices you are quoted reflect a market where the biggest customers are bidding for the same hardware.
Portability is worth something, and it is not free. Using a provider's managed services is usually faster and cheaper to run than assembling the same thing yourself, and it makes moving harder later. That is a reasonable trade, but it should be a decision rather than an accident.
The questions that actually decide it
Where must the data live? If a client contract or a regulator requires data to stay in a particular country, that narrows the list before anything else does. This is the question that most often overrules everything below it.
What does your team already know? A platform your people can operate at 2am beats a marginally better one they have to learn during an incident.
What does leaving look like? Not as a plan to leave — as a test of how deeply you are tied in. If you cannot describe roughly how you would move, you don't know what you signed.
What are the real costs? Compute is the visible number. Egress charges, storage tiers, support plans and the managed-service premiums are where cloud bills actually grow.
Small is still allowed
Not every business needs a hyperscaler. A company running a website, a business system and some file storage may be better served by a smaller host or a managed arrangement where somebody else handles the machine, particularly when the alternative is nobody in-house having time to look after it.
The mistake we see is not choosing the wrong provider. It is choosing one and then leaving it unattended: no patching schedule, no tested restore, no idea who would notice a failure. The provider's logo on the invoice does not do any of that for you.
What we do with this
We host applications and websites and look after them, and we work with what a client already runs rather than insisting on a migration. Where the data has to live and who has to be able to operate it are the first two questions we ask, in that order.
Related: web hosting, infrastructure support and DevOps.
Sources
- Synergy Research Group, "Cloud Market Share Trends — Big Three Together Hold 63% while Oracle and the Neoclouds Inch Higher", read 18 September 2026: https://www.srgresearch.com/articles/cloud-market-share-trends-big-three-together-hold-63-while-oracle-and-the-neoclouds-inch-higher
- Synergy Research Group, Cloud Infrastructure Services research page: https://www.srgresearch.com/research/cloud-infrastructure-services