By Chinenye Anuforo
Synergy Research’s latest analysis unveiled a substantial surge in enterprise expenditure on cloud infrastructure services, reaching a remarkable $94 billion worldwide in the first quarter of 2025.
This figure represents a significant $17.5 billion increase, or a robust 23% growth, when compared to the corresponding period in 2024. The firm’s findings underscored the continued growth in cloud adoption by businesses globally.
According to Synergy, this growth is even more pronounced when accounting for currency exchange rate fluctuations over the past year. Had these fluctuations not occurred, the year-on-year growth rate would have been closer to 25%, highlighting the underlying strength of the cloud market.
The report emphasized the transformative impact of Generative AI (GenAI) on the cloud ecosystem. Since the emergence of ChatGPT, GenAI has exerted a profound impact on the IT ecosystem, contributing to an acceleration of the cloud market’s growth rate by approximately seven percentage points. Consequently, the market has expanded by an impressive 52% since the end of 2022. Revenues specifically tied to AI services have witnessed an extraordinary surge, registering growth in the range of 140-160% compared to the previous year.
John Dinsdale, chief analyst at Synergy Research Group, commented on these findings: “We continue to see strong revenue and growth numbers coming out of the cloud market, with a major acceleration of growth over the last six quarters. All of the leading cloud providers are posting some impressive numbers.”
He further elaborated on the driving forces behind this expansion stating, “While the growth is broad based across geographies and services, clearly AI is making a big difference. We saw growth of 140-160% in GenAI-specific services, with AI also contributing to service enhancements and added growth across the broader portfolio. The capex numbers are huge, but so are the incremental revenues of .”
In terms of market share, AmazonWeb Services (AWS) continues to lead the pack. However, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform demonstrated higher percentage growth rates during the first quarter of 2025. Their respective worldwide market shares for Q1 stood at 29% for AWS, 22% for Azure, and 12% for Google Cloud.
Synergy’s report also acknowledged the strong performance of several tier two cloud providers, including CoreWeave, Oracle, Databricks, Snowflake, Cloudflare, and Huawei, all of which exhibited the highest growth rates within this group.
Notably, CoreWeave, with its specialized AI and GPU services, is identified as being on the verge of breaking into the top twelve global cloud providers.
Public Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings remain the dominant segments of the cloud market, accounting for the bulk of the revenue. These services collectively grew by 24% in Q1 2025, or 26% when measured in constant currency. The concentration of market share among the top three providers is particularly evident in the public cloud space, where AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud together command 68% of the market
Geographically, the growth in cloud spending was widespread across all regions. However, several markets exhibited growth rates exceeding the global average, including Brazil, Spain, Italy, South Korea, India, Australia, and Indonesia. The United States remains the largest single cloud market and recorded a substantial growth rate of 24% in Q1 2025. Within Europe, while the United Kingdom and Germany represent the largest cloud markets by volume, Ireland, Spain, and Italy were highlighted as significant markets with the highest rates of expansion.