Google Cloud Growing 50% Faster than Microsoft, Amazon; Q3 Pace Tops Q2

While Microsoft (31%) and Amazon (29%) posted strong cloud-revenue growth rates for Q3, Google Cloud retained its claim to being the fastest-growing cloud vendor by boosting its revenue 44.8% in the quarter.

(On my Cloud Wars Top 10 weekly rankings, Microsoft is #1, Amazon is #2, and Google is #4.)

Of course, it must be pointed out that as impressive as Google Cloud’s 44.8% achievement is, its revenue is much smaller than the cloud revenue of either Microsoft or Amazon:

• for Q3, Google Cloud revenue was $3.444 billion;

• Microsoft’s was $15.2 billion; and

• Amazon AWS’s was $11.6 billion.

So that factor of relative size must be taken into account.

At the same time, Google Cloud’s Q3 performance stands out because Thomas Kurian’s company was the only one of those three that managed to increase its cloud-revenue growth rate in Q3 over Q2:

• Microsoft’s cloud-revenue growth rate in Q3 grew was 31%, down from Q2’s 32%;

• Amazon’s cloud-revenue growth rate in Q3 was 29%, flat from Q2’s 29%; and

• Google Cloud’s growth Q3 growth rate of 44.8% was up from Q2’s 43.2%.

The table below for AWS breaks out its net sales and operating income for the past several quarters, and also shows that its revenue for the past 12 months was $42.6 billion.

The comparable last-12-months figure for Microsoft is $55.3 billion, and for Google Cloud it’s $11.84 billion.

Disclosure: at the time of this writing, Microsoft and Google Cloud were among the many clients of Cloud Wars Media LLC and/or Evans Strategic Communications LLC.

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