AWS, Microsoft, and Google continue to dominate the global public cloud market, as reported by Synergy Research Group. These tech giants hold market shares of 32%, 23%, and 12%, respectively. No other company captures more than 4% of the market. Following them are Alibaba, Oracle, and Salesforce, which round out the top cloud providers globally worldwide.
Their dominance remains consistent across all regions except for China. In China, local providers like Alibaba, Tencent, China Telecom, and Huawei hold the top spots. Chinese firms entirely dominate the country’s cloud market. This highlights China’s unique competitive landscape, where global giants struggle to gain a foothold.
The United States is by far the largest cloud market, followed by China, Japan, the UK, Germany, and India. John Dinsdale, Chief Analyst at Synergy Research Group, emphasized the scale at play. “Amazon, Microsoft, and Google now operate over 560 hyperscale data centers globally. In Q2 alone, they invested over $48 billion in capex, primarily to build, equip, and update their data centers and networks.”
While global giants dominate, Dinsdale noted that local companies can still compete effectively in their home markets by focusing on specialized services. They can demonstrate competitive advantages over industry leaders.
On the mergers and acquisitions front, Synergy Research Group observed a surge in deal-making, forecasting record levels for 2024. M&A deals are expected to surpass $40 billion, following a slowdown in 2023. This year, $36.7 billion in deals have already closed, with another $7.1 billion agreed upon but not yet finalized.
The peak years for M&A in the data center industry were 2021 and 2022, driven by massive deals like the acquisitions of CyrusOne, Switch, CoreSite, and QTS. These were each valued at over $10 billion. The increasing demand for data center capacity, fueled by the growth of cloud services, social networking, and digital services, drove these deals. Since 2021, private equity has accounted for 85-90% of the value of closed deals, as data centers have become a long-term safe haven for investments.
As the global cloud and data center markets evolve, AWS, Microsoft, and Google are poised to maintain their leadership. Meanwhile, local providers in markets like China will continue to assert their dominance.
