Cloud Market to Grow to $330B in 2024, Generative AI Accounts for Half of Growth

In Q4 2024, corporate spending on cloud services worldwide amounted to $91 billion, which is $17 billion (22%) more than in Q4 2023. For the full year, the market grew to $330 billion, $60 billion more than the previous year, and $102 billion more than in 2022, according to statistics from Synergy Research Group. At the same time, generative AI has provided half of the market growth over the past two years. The reason is not only the development of new services based on it, but also the trend for renting AI accelerators in the cloud, as well as the improvement of other cloud services.

Amazon (AWS) maintains its market leadership by a wide margin, although Microsoft and Google have been growing faster recently. Overall, their shares of the global cloud services market are 30%, 21% and 12%, respectively. If we talk only about public clouds, the combined share of the big three is 68%. Among the “second-tier” cloud service providers, CoreWeave, Oracle, Snowflake, Cloudflare and Databricks grew the fastest year-on-year. At the same time, CoreWeave broke into the Top 20 cloud service providers precisely thanks to AI services and accelerator leasing.

Image source: Synergy Research Group

With most providers having already released their Q4 revenue data, the agency estimates that quarterly cloud revenue (including IaaS, PaaS, and private cloud services) was $90.6 billion, with full-year 2024 revenue reaching $330.4 billion. IaaS and PaaS account for the majority of the market, growing by 24% in the most recent quarter. The agency noted that not only was Q4 strong, but it also had a positive impact on the annual growth rate, which was 4 percentage points higher than in 2023. For a market of this size, this is considered a very significant indicator.

The cloud market is growing rapidly in all regions of the world. When measured in local currencies, it is registered that it is developing most actively, exceeding the global average, in Brazil, Spain, Italy, India and Japan. The largest cloud market is still the United States – in terms of scale, it exceeds the market of the entire Asia-Pacific region. In Q4, the market in the United States grew by 23%. In Europe, the largest markets are the UK and Germany, while the large markets with the fastest growth rates were Ireland, Spain and Italy.

Synergy experts emphasize that ChatGPT, launched in late 2022, certainly helped the development of services in 2023 and stimulated more aggressive market growth in 2024. According to Synergy, since the launch of ChatGPT, generative AI systems have been responsible for at least half of the revenue growth of cloud services. This was due to either newly commissioned AI services and accelerator rental services, or due to improvements to existing cloud services using AI.