With Google Cloud, Microsoft, and AWS all slated to release Q1 numbers in a couple of weeks, let’s take a look at what those results are likely to tell us in terms of who’s hot, who’s not, and who’s winning the hearts, minds, and wallets of customers building their AI Economy futures.
We’ll start with a quick look back to assess the varying levels of momentum across Google Cloud, Microsoft, and AWS as reflected in the Q4 numbers that came out about three months ago:
- Google Cloud powerfully underscored its new position atop the Cloud Wars Top 10 with a blowout performance: Q4 revenue up an eye-popping 48% to $17.7 billion;
- Microsoft showed yet again that it is by far the world’s largest cloud and AI provider with calendar-Q4 (Microsoft’s fiscal Q2) revenue of $51.3 billion, up 26%; and
- AWS posted another quarter of accelerating growth with revenue up 24% to $35.6 billion.
These numbers tell us a few things, starting with relative mass but also encompassing who’s hottest in the market:
- Microsoft’s cloud business is 50% bigger than AWS and
- 200% bigger than Google Cloud, while
- Google Cloud is growing 100% faster than AWS and
- almost 100% faster than Microsoft.
Some people will (foolishly) pooh-pooh Google Cloud’s huge lead in growth rates, claiming that it’s no big deal because the other two hyperscalers are so much larger than Google Cloud.
But I would say that presumes they’re operating in a market that doesn’t change much, and that forward-looking growth is no different than past growth. BUT — the cloud and AI business is the polar opposite of static, and the forward-looking growth reflects not only cloud technologies but also AI, which is the most-disruptive technology ever created.
And the numbers show that as the AI Revolution intensifies, Google Cloud has taken the lead.
Growth Trends Across 2025
Next, let’s pull back a bit and evaluate the growth trends of those three companies over the past four quarters (I’m not including Oracle because I extensively analyzed its fiscal-Q3 numbers a few weeks ago). I’ll start with the most-recent growth rates for Q4 2025 and then roll backward through Q1 2025:
- Google Cloud: 48%, 34%, 32%, 28%
- Microsoft: 26%, 26%, 27%, 20%
- AWS: 24%, 20%, 17.5%, 17%
Again, these numbers obliterate the flimsy argument that Google Cloud’s soaring growth rate is no big deal because the other two are larger. While the growth rate of Microsoft’s cloud business has levelled off at around 26% for the past few quarters, Google Cloud’s has soared from 32% to 34% to 48%, showing an undeniable tendency among more and more customers to go with Google Cloud.
A Breakthrough: Incremental Growth in Q4 over Q3
Here’s how I described this powerful trend in my early-February comparison on the numbers:
- Google Cloud: $2.5 billion
- Microsoft: $2.4 billion
- AWS: $2.6 billion
**Nice clean win here for AWS, particularly over Microsoft. BUT: Since AWS is 100% bigger than Google Cloud, shouldn’t we expect its incremental Q4 revenue to be much larger — perhaps on the scale of 100% larger — than that of Google Cloud? And if it’s not bigger by that much — and it is certainly not — then we have to ask why is that the case? To me, the answer is that Google Cloud is winning a disproportionately large share of current/future business because it is winning the battle of tomorrow, not those of yesterday.
Think about that: Microsoft’s calendar-Q4 cloud revenue was 3X that of Google Cloud, yet in those three Q4 months of October, November, and December, Google Cloud generated more incremental cloud revenue than did Microsoft: $2.5 billion for Google Cloud versus $2.4 billion for Microsoft.
Anybody think that’s a coincidence?
Prediction for Q1 Results
While Google Cloud under Thomas Kurian has always been a high-paced innovator, the scale and scope of its rollout of new technologies and solutions and partnerships across the enterprise-tech spectrum over the past 18 months has been extraordinary. So I fully expect Google Cloud to deliver another round of eye-popping results for Q1, which I am expecting to look something like this when Q1 results come out in a couple of weeks:
Google Cloud up 44% to $17.7 billion;
Microsoft Cloud up 25% to $53 billion; and
AWS up 23% to $36.0 billion.
Ask Cloud Wars AI Agent about this analysis
