With the growing excitement around generative AI in the cloud industry, it’s a pivotal moment to identify this quarter’s champions and pinpoint the leading company delivering top-notch generative AI services to its customers. Examining the latest quarterly results, Azure shines brightly in the generative AI arena, boasting impressive 26 percent growth which translates to $ 55 billion revenue, backed by their cutting-edge Azure OpenAI Services. Following closely are Google and AWS, with 28 and 12 percent growth, respectively.
Overall, it was a great quarter for hyperscalers.
According to estimates from Synergy Research Group in Q2 2023 cloud services spending is on the rise, and Amazon’s worldwide market share has jumped by over 1% to reach almost 34%.
In Q1 2023, Amazon’s AWS cloud market share was 32%, Azure’s was 23% and Google’s cloud was 10%. Amazon saw a slight downward trend in its market share from 34 percent in Q3 2022, to 33 percent in Q4 2022. At the same time, Microsoft gained two points since Q3 2022 and now sits at 23 percent market share, gradually eating away at Amazon’s lead.
Revenue Galores
Google Cloud, one of the major cloud service providers, reported a 28% increase in revenue, reaching $8.1 billion, surpassing expectations of $7.75 billion. Microsoft’s Azure revenue also rose by 26%, exceeding growth estimates from Visible Alpha.
Microsoft usually does not break out precise quarterly revenue for Azure, its most crucial tool to leverage generative AI endeavors. However, in the earnings call, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella revealed that Microsoft Cloud surpassed $110 billion in annual revenue, up 27% in constant currency, with Azure all-up accounting for more than 50% of the total for the first time putting Azure sales at $55 billion or more and revealing the size of the business.
AWS’s second-quarter cloud sales increased 12% to $22.1 billion which is less as compared to both Google Cloud and Azure.
On the other hand, Oracle is also making huge leaps as in its fourth quarter results announced in June, it saw a jump of 23% in its revenue in USD and up 25% in constant currency to $9.4 billion. Recently, Oracle partnered with Cohere to bring generative AI applications to its customers.
Analysts and industry experts believe that cloud business growth will speed up in the coming months, especially in the June quarter as uncertainties start to clear. Investors anticipate that AI will play a significant role in driving growth for cloud businesses in the next year, with Microsoft’s Azure leading the way, followed by Amazon.com’s AWS and Google Cloud.
Fueled by Generative AI
While AWS leads the cloud market share, it seems like Azure has taken the lead in integrating generative AI applications as it has a special partnership with OpenAI. To add to this they also have a partnership with Meta where they provide Llama 2 on Azure cloud which gives them a double edge.
The core for Amazon is its AI foundation model service called Bedrock. The service, introduced in April, initially supported models from AI21, Anthropic, and Stability AI, along with Amazon Titan models. Now, the range of supported models has been broadened to include Cohere, Anthropic Claude 2, and Stability AI SDXL 1.0 models.
Considering revenue growth, it’s evident that Microsoft’s Azure held the lead in the generative AI advantage within its cloud platform for this quarter.
To challenge Azure, Google introduced Generative AI on Vertex AI, offering customers access to a variety of model types and sizes through Vertex AI’s Model Garden. Customers can also utilize Google’s foundational models via APIs. The underlying model driving the PaLM API is PaLM 2. However, Vertex AI hasn’t gained much popularity among enterprises yet.
Though Google Cloud’s market share is lowest as compared to AWS and Azure, CEO Sundar Pichai in the earnings call pointed out that more than 70% of gen AI unicorns are Google Cloud customers, including Cohere, Jasper, Typeface, and many more. He added that Google provides the widest choice of AI supercomputer options with Google TPUs and advanced NVIDIA GPUs.
Yet, when looking at AWS’s approach of employing multiple LLM models, it seems they are poised to challenge Azure in the upcoming quarters. On the other hand, Oracle has much ground to cover, as their partnership is limited to Cohere, which is already accessible via AWS Bedrock.
In the world of cloud computing, the recent earnings report has shown a fierce competition among big players in generative AI. Azure seems ahead with its strong partnerships, while AWS’s diverse approach and Oracle’s progress keep the race exciting. As cloud business grows and generative AI’s importance rises, the next quarters will be a dynamic battlefield for leadership in generative AI.
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