Amazon, Microsoft, Google Got 2/3 of Global Q4 Cloud Spend: Report

Worldwide cloud infrastructure services spending topped $50 billion in a quarter for the first time in Q4, growing 34% year on year to $53.5 billion, reported Canalys Thursday. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, grew 45% in total, to 64% of customer spend, it said. Continuing COVID-19 pandemic-related consumption drivers -- remote working and learning, e-commerce, gaming and content streaming were contributors -- along with healthcare and public sector infrastructure services, it said. The metaverse will drive future demand and the need for more powerful, distributed, intelligent and scalable services with lower latency, Canalys said. The metaverse will resemble the internet today, “with enhanced capabilities and an amplified compute consumption rate,” said the research firm. Use cases are expected to be gaming, social media, workplace collaboration, education, real estate, e-commerce and digital commerce, including nonfungible tokens, it said.