Gartner predicts that global corporate spending on cloud computing in 2022 will grow 20% YoY to $494.7B, and cloud platform services to grow 26% to $109.6B
Angus Loten / Wall Street Journal : Source: Gartner .
Context & Ripple Effects
Gartner's April 2022 forecast lands mid-arc: weeks earlier it had pegged total tech spending at just 4% growth for 2022 ($4.4T overall), so a 20% cloud number frames cloud as the segment absorbing nearly all incremental IT budget. The firm's own market-share survey showed why the money concentrates there — AWS held a 41% share of public cloud in 2020, with Azure growing faster off a smaller base.
First-order effects
- Cloud vendors — led by the hyperscalers Gartner already tracks as share leaders — capture a disproportionate slice of 2022 IT budgets, with platform services (+26%) growing fastest and favoring PaaS/IaaS players over device and software sellers.
Second-order effects
- Non-cloud categories in Gartner's own forecast (devices, traditional software) compete against a segment growing five times faster, pressuring vendors there to shift offerings toward consumption-based cloud models.
- Sustained 20%-plus cloud growth extends the capex treadmill RBC documented when operators' spending rose from $63.8B to a projected $81B (2017–2018 capex surge) — revenue growth forces matching infrastructure investment.
Third-order effects
- The pattern that held through 2022 — total tech spending growth cut to ~3% by August while cloud stayed near 20% (Gartner's downward revision) and 2023 cloud still forecast at 20.7% (to $591.8B) — points to cloud becoming the default destination for enterprise IT spend regardless of macro conditions, concentrating budget power further in a few hyperscalers.
The trend: Cloud spending is decoupling from overall IT budgets, growing through downturns while every other category flattens.