AWS Feels The Heat As Cloud Rivals Accelerate Growth

Global cloud market continues its rapid ascent.

AWS is facing mounting pressure as Microsoft, Google, and a wave of specialized newcomers chip away at its long-standing lead in the global cloud market.

New data from Synergy Research Group, covering the last 20 quarters of enterprise cloud infrastructure spending, highlights both the sector's massive growth and shifting landscape.

According to Synergy, the Big Three – AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud – collectively captured 63 percent of worldwide cloud infrastructure spend in Q3 2025, up from 62 percent a year earlier and 61 percent the year before.

Their expansion reflects not only market dominance but also the steady absorption of share from legacy and niche providers.

And that wider share is over an ever-expanding market: the cloud infrastructure market was valued at $107 billion in Q3 2025, a near-60 percent jump from the $68 billion recorded two years earlier.

Despite maintaining the global lead, however, AWS is no longer widening the gap.

Synergy's figures indicate that Amazon's market share peaked in Q2 2022 and has declined gradually since. AWS still commanded 29 percent of global spend in Q3, but both Microsoft and Google are closing in more quickly than at any point in the past.

"Amazon's market share has averaged just under 30percent over the past four quarters, down from a little over 32 percent in 2021," said John Dinsdale, Chief Analyst at Synergy Research Group.

"Its share is showing gradual erosion as Microsoft and Google continue to close the gap, yet it remains striking how effectively Amazon has maintained its leadership position."

Microsoft, with 20 percent of global spend, continues to show cyclical quarter-to-quarter results but maintains an upward long-term trend.

Google Cloud, at 13 percent of spend share, is still firmly third but remains nearly four times the size of fourth-placed Alibaba, showing the big gap between the dominant players and the rest of the market.

AI Drives Small Competitors Forward

Outside the big three, smaller providers are exploring new territory, especially in AI-centric infrastructure.

Oracle and a group of emerging "neoclouds" are slowly increasing their market share, with the latter appealing to companies seeking GPU-dense clusters and AI development environments rather than traditional compute and storage.

CoreWeave leads this new cohort (though serious questions remain about its business model and long-term viability), but Crusoe, Nebius and Lambda are also accelerating rapidly.

IBM, meanwhile, has seen the sharpest decline, with its market share dropping from 5 percent in Q4 2020 to roughly half that today.

Global Growth Accelerates

Cloud spending expanded across all global regions in Q3, with the fastest-growing countries including India, Australia, Indonesia, Ireland, Mexico and South Africa, each outpacing the global average.

The USA remains the undisputed center of gravity, larger than the entire Asia-Pacific region combined, and growing 28percent during the quarter.

In Europe the UK and Germany are still the largest markets, though Ireland, Spain and Italy posted the strongest growth.

The UK's Competition and Markets Authority stated in its August report that AWS and Azure each account for 30 percent to 40 percent of UK infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) spending.

Google, the third-largest player in the region, trails sharply with 5 percent to 10 percent.

This article originally appeared on our sister site, Computing.