Welcome to the Cloud Wars Minute — your daily cloud news and commentary show. Each episode provides insights and perspectives around the “reimagination machine” that is the cloud.
In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I analyze Q4 performance to reveal who’s truly leading in cloud growth right now.
Highlights
00:03 — We’re just a couple weeks away from getting Q1 results of the hyperscalers and some other companies in the Cloud Wars Top 10, I wanted to take a look at these world-shaping companies. Let’s start off by taking a quick look back at Q4 and some numbers for Google Cloud, Microsoft, and AWS.
00:34 — I’m not including Oracle in this hyperscaler comparison because it’s on a different financial reporting schedule, and I recently covered Oracle’s most recent financial results in detail. So if we compare the Q4 growth rates for Google Cloud, Microsoft, and AWS: 48%, 26%, 24%. Now some people say, “Oh, that’s not fair. That’s not legit. Google Cloud is so much smaller.”
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01:01 — Let’s look: $17.7 billion for Google Cloud, $51.3 billion for Microsoft, $35.6 for AWS. So AWS is about twice as big as Google Cloud, and relative to Microsoft, Microsoft is three times bigger than Google Cloud. Riddle me this: how then, if you look at Q4 cloud and AI revenue versus Q3, Google Cloud came up with more revenue — more incremental Q4 over Q3 revenue — $2.5 billion versus $2.4?
02:23 — Yet AWS came up with more — significantly more — revenue Q4 over Q3 than Microsoft did: $2.6 billion versus $2.4. Now what does that mean? Well, it could be a temporary blip. It could be an anomaly. I think all of these things are valid. They all are pointing toward bets that customers are making about who is the company best equipped to take my company into the AI future.
03:49 — Google Cloud came up with almost as much as AWS. And to me, that just says Google Cloud is the hot company right now. So let me wrap up here with an outlook for Q1. I think both Google Cloud and Microsoft say that they will be releasing their financial results for Q1 on April 29. I think we’re going to see Google Cloud report a growth rate of 44%, Microsoft 25%, and AWS 23%.
