For anyone anchored in the past and unable to stop yammering “AWS is king of the cloud,” the Q1 numbers make it unmistakably clear that customers are making Google Cloud the AI and cloud vendor of choice as measured by revenue from the recent past and backlog for the future.
For the quarter ended March 31:
Revenue growth rate:
- Google Cloud 63%
- AWS 28%
Cloud revenue
- Google Cloud $20.0 billion
- AWS $37.6 billion
Backlog total
- Google Cloud $462 billion
- AWS $364 billion (not including recent $100-billion Anthropic deal)
Backlog growth rate
- Google Cloud 93%
- AWS 49%
While I stand 100% behind my headline, it’s also important for me to give full credit where it is due: AWS had a great quarter — and by all measures. In Q1, AWS’s growth continued to accelerate, jumping from 24% in Q4 to Q1’s 28%, which Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said represents AWS’s highest growth rate in 15 quarters. All phases of its business are doing well, and it continues to expand its long list of happy, satisfied customers.
But Google Cloud simply had a better quarter, outgrowing AWS in revenue by way more than 2X and in backlog by almost 2X. No doubt some AWS fans will seize on the Q1 revenue disparities between the companies — $37.6 billion for AWS versus $20 billion for Google Cloud — and attempt to use that variance to dismiss the enormous gap in growth rates. That’s a hollow argument because Google Cloud has not only a vastly higher Q1 growth rate then AWS, but also has been been expanding that gap quarter after quarter for more than 2 years.
So, Q1’s numbers are not outliers — they’re the latest instance of Google Cloud proving quarter after quarter after quarter that it is grabbing share rapidly and relentlessly from AWS.
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In addition, the argument that Google Cloud’s superior growth rate is negated by AWS being much larger falls apart for another reason: since AWS’s Q1 revenue is about 85% bigger than Google Cloud’s ($37.6 billion versus $20.0 billion), then shouldn’t we expect that AWS would be able to leverage all of that superior market presence and influence into a backlog that is somewhere in the range of 85% larger than Google Cloud’s?
If someone wants to play the absolute size game versus the growth-and-momentum game, then yes, we should definitely be able to expect that AWS’s backlog would be proportionately bigger than Google Cloud’s.
But the numbers show something wildly different: not only is AWS’s backlog not vastly larger than Google Cloud’s, but Google Cloud in Q1 soared past AWS in backlog volume: $462 billion versus $364 billion.
Again, this is not an outlier — this trend has been revealed in quarterly numbers for the past year as Google Cloud’s backlog growth has outpaced that of AWS time after time, with Google Cloud now having overtaken AWS by a significant degree.
As I’ve noted before, the emergence over the past 18-24 months of backlog or RPO numbers have given us a superb view into where customers are placing their future bets. While quarterly revenue figures are hugely important because they disclose the latest hard-and-fast results, backlog and RPO figures have in my mind become equally important because they reveal who’s winning the battles of today and tomorrow versus those of the recent past.
Each number — revenue and backlog/RPO — is telling, but together they are even more powerful than each individually because they tell us not only where the recent money has gone but also where future money is headed. So, let me put those numbers back out there for you to consider one more time:
Revenue growth rate:
- Google Cloud 63%
- AWS 28%
Cloud revenue
- Google Cloud $20.0 billion
- AWS $37.6 billion
Backlog total
- Google Cloud $462 billion
- AWS $364 billion (not including recent $100-billion Anthropic deal)
Backlog growth rate
- Google Cloud 93%
- AWS 49%
So you tell me: which company has more momentum as the AI Revolution turns the Cloud Wars upside-down?
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