The three largest cloud players in the industry include Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. Following the Covid-19 pandemic, the shift towards digital technology has accelerated leading to more and more companies utilizing cloud-based technologies and services to accelerate their digitalization. People are buying products online mainly and the shift that the pandemic has brought is going to stick. As a result, the leading cloud players have experienced rapid growth in their sales and revenues from cloud products and services.
Amazon has by far been being touted as the largest cloud player with the highest market share followed by Microsoft and Google. However, in 2020, Microsoft enjoyed enormous growth in sales and revenue and its cloud revenue was above what AWS generated. The table below shows the cloud revenue of the three companies over the past two years.
| Year | Amazon | Microsoft | |
| 2020 | $45.4 B | $48.4 B | $13.06 B |
| 2019 | $35 B | $38.9 B | $8.9 B |
Amazon vs Microsoft vs Google Cloud Revenues. Data from Annual Reports.
As you can see in the table above, Microsoft is leading in terms of revenue. Its net revenue from intelligent cloud jumped to $48.4 billion in 2020 from $38.9 B in 2019. On the other hand, Amazon’s cloud revenue (AWS revenue) remained $45.4 billion in 2020 compared to $35 billion in 2019. Google’s revenue from cloud services also experienced significant growth in 2020 and jumped to $13.06 billion from $8.9 billion in 2019.
One of the leading factors that Microsoft is experiencing faster growth is its customer-oriented cloud model. Both its CEO and CFO have stressed modeling cloud services according to customer needs and not based on years-old acronyms still in use throughout the industry.