Dive Brief:
- The three largest hyperscalers — AWS, Microsoft and Google Cloud — captured nearly 71% of the expanding market for cloud infrastructure services last year, according to a Gartner report published Wednesday.
- Global IaaS market growth showed no signs of slowing down, thanks to enterprise AI adoption plans, the analyst firm said. Cloud infrastructure services spend increased 22.5% year over year to $171.8 billion in 2024. In comparison, the market grew just 16.2% to $140 billion the prior year.
- “As enterprises continue to seek greater flexibility, improved resilience and optimized performance, there is sustained demand for cloud migration and modernization services,” Gartner Principal Analyst Hardeep Singh said in the report. “Enterprises want to transform their IT infrastructure by leveraging multiple platforms for AI and prioritizing modernization by migrating existing workloads to the cloud.”
Dive Insight:
Generative AI’s outsized appetite for high-capacity compute remains a driving force behind massive cloud infrastructure investments, as hyperscalers race to meet enterprise demand.
Ongoing efforts to expand cloud capacity were the prime mover behind a more than 50% year-over-year data center spending spike during the first three months of 2025, when infrastructure CapEx reached $134 billion, according to Dell’Oro Group. Cloud buildouts helped drive data center investments to over $450 billion last year, a 51% increase over the prior year, the analyst firm said in March.
Infrastructure services constitute the bedrock of digital transformation, despite accounting for less than one-third of a global market that surpassed $600 billion last year, Gartner told CIO Dive. While software and platform services — SaaS and PaaS — account for the bulk of cloud spend, AI adoption is shifting hyperscaler and enterprise priorities.
“Cloud providers are investing heavily in AI infrastructure and capabilities to become leaders in the rapidly evolving AI-optimized IaaS market,” Singh said. “They expect that AI will become a much larger revenue contributor in the future, even though it currently remains a relatively small slice of their overall revenue within the IaaS space.”
AWS owned the largest share of the IaaS pie, with nearly 38% of the global market last year. Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud captured 24% and 9%, respectively.
Gartner expects global cloud spend to top $700 billion in 2025, as the infrastructure services market expands by 25% year over year to more than $210 billion.
