A breakdown of Google Cloud's rivalry with AWS and Azure as analysts expect $26B in 2022 GCP revenue and IDC predicts ~30% YoY cloud market growth until 2025
Context & Ripple Effects
This Bloomberg breakdown lands mid-arc in Google Cloud's scale-up story. Two years earlier, GCP was running at $3B a quarter, its growth flattered by G Suite's April price increase, and Gartner's 2020 survey showed AWS alone at $26.2B — so the analysts' $26B expectation for GCP's full-year 2022 is effectively 'catch up to where AWS was two years ago.'
The rivalry framing matters because the trailing data shows a stable three-player race: Gartner had Azure at $12.7B growing ~60% versus AWS's ~29%, and later Altimeter numbers put AWS at 31% share, Azure 25%, Google 11%. The question the piece probes is whether IDC's ~30% annual market growth through 2025 lets all three grow in absolute terms even as relative positions barely move.
First-order effects
- Google Cloud enters 2022 on track for roughly $26B in revenue — still a distant third to AWS and Azure, but large enough that its growth rate, not its size, is the competitive variable AWS and Azure must answer.
Second-order effects
- With IDC projecting ~30% annual market growth through 2025, AWS and Azure can keep posting record absolute gains even while ceding share-of-growth to Google — which pushes competition toward discounts, committed-spend deals, and multi-cloud concessions rather than headline market share.
Third-order effects
- The pattern that later shows up in Google Cloud's Q3 2024 results — faster growth than AWS but a far thinner operating margin (17% vs 38%) — suggests the structural endgame is a three-hyperscaler market where Google keeps buying share with infrastructure spend while AWS monetizes incumbency, and buyers exploit the rivalry through multi-cloud bargaining.
The trend: The cloud market is compounding near 30% a year through 2025 while consolidating into a durable three-hyperscaler structure in which the third player grows fastest but profits last.