Enterprise cloud infrastructure uptake shows no sign of slowing

Cloud infrastructure services grew at their fastest for eight years during the second quarter of 2026, thanks to the AI craze and continued demand for flexible and scalable IT infrastructure. According to the latest figures from Synergy Research, enterprise spending on cloud infrastructure passed $143 billion in Q2, a year-on-year growth rate of 43 percent. This followed 11 successive quarters of increasing growth rates, during which the market has now doubled in size. Synergy says that total market revenues for the preceding 12 months add up to an impressive $500 billion. Public IaaS and PaaS platforms account for the bulk of this, and these expanded by 47 percent during Q2. While cloud-based services have been growing at quite a decent rate for some time as organizations expand their IT using this route, the introduction of AI services has given them an extra boost. “AI has, of course, driven most of that incremental growth, and we now see year-on-year growth rates of 165 percent for AI-specific cloud services. It is the handful of leading cloud providers and neoclouds who are mostly benefiting from that market acceleration,” comments Synergy chief analyst John Dinsdale. And the top three global players continue to dominate the market, with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud together accounting for 67 percent of all the cloud revenue during the quarter. That percentage has increased since the third quarter of last year, when the triumvirate made up 63 percent of enterprise cloud infra spending. AWS is still the largest beast in this sector of the compute arena, taking 28 percent of the market, but its lead over Microsoft is now less impressive, with the Redmond giant making up another 20 percent. Google remains in third place on the global stage, at 15 percent. Among the tier two cloud providers, Synergy reckons those with the highest growth rates include CoreWeave, Oracle, Crusoe, Nebius, and Nscale. However, Oracle accounts for 4 percent of market share, while CoreWeave is another 2 percent. Other firms with a market share of 1 percent (to the nearest percentage point) include IBM, Akamai, Baidu, China Mobile, China Telecom, China Unicom, Snowflake, Tencent, and SAP. Synergy says that nine rent-a-gpu neocloud operators are now among the top 40 cloud providers, based on service revenue. Geographically, the US remains the world’s largest cloud market by some margin, and its share is actually increasing, growing by 49 percent in Q2, well above the worldwide average. Other countries growing at above the average include India, Indonesia, Ireland, Thailand, and Malaysia. In Europe, the largest cloud markets remain the UK and Germany, but the fastest growing markets are Ireland, Norway, Denmark, and Finland.®