Report: AWS has 45% share of worldwide public Infrastructure as a Service market, more than Microsoft, Google, and IBM combined
Amazon Web Services holds a 45 percent share of the worldwide public market for Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) — greater than Microsoft …
Context & Ripple Effects
At the time of this report, AWS's 45% public IaaS share was the high-water mark of early cloud consolidation — a single vendor outsizing Microsoft, Google, and IBM put together. The coverage arc since then is a story of that dominance eroding in relative terms while the pie explodes.
The follow-on data points trace the compression: by the 2018 RightScale State of the Cloud report, AWS enterprise adoption was still growing but its lead was shrinking as Azure grew 35%, Google 26%, and IBM 50%; Gartner's 2020 survey showed Azure growing ~60% against AWS's ~29%; and by Q1 2024 Altimeter pegged AWS at 31% with Azure at 25% and Google at 11% (Synergy/Altimeter data).
First-order effects
- In 2016, Microsoft, Google, and IBM each faced the direct problem that their entire IaaS businesses combined were smaller than AWS's — pricing power and reference-customer gravity sat with Amazon.
Second-order effects
- The named challengers responded with faster growth rates rather than price wars alone: Azure's ~60% growth in 2020 versus AWS's ~29% (Gartner) and IBM's 50% enterprise adoption growth in 2018 (RightScale) show share being bought back through hybrid and enterprise relationships.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, cloud infrastructure settles into a durable three-player oligopoly — AWS first, Azure closing, Google third — where no vendor regains 45%-style dominance because enterprises deliberately multi-source, as the RightScale adoption data already implied.
The trend: Cloud infrastructure is consolidating around a few hyperscale platforms whose leader's relative share steadily compresses even as absolute spending grows every year.