It seems that the world can’t get enough of spending on cloud infrastructure, according to beancounters at Canalys.
Worldwide cloud spending was more than $50 billion for the first time in the final quarter of 2021 and total spending grew 34 percent to $53.5 billion in the fourth quarter of 2021, up to $13.6 billion last year.
For the full year, total cloud infrastructure services spending grew 35 percent to $191.7 billion compared with $142 billion in 2020, which Canalys said was down to the “reopening of economies post-lockdowns and growing customer confidence during the year”.
Canalys research analyst Blake Murray said that compute will be in high demand in virtual and augmented reality environments, while storage, machine learning, IoT and data analytics will be essential to support operations such as digital twinning, modelling and interactivity in the metaverse.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) led the cloud infrastructure services market in Q4 2021, accounting for 33 percent of total spending while growing 40 percent on an annual basis.
Microsoft Azure had a 22 percent market share and was the second-largest provider, growing 46 per cent which Canalys said was “driven by long-term consumption commitments”.
Meanwhile, Google Cloud was the third-largest provider and grew 63 percent to account for nine per cent of the total market.
Canalys also credited “lasting pandemic-related consumption drivers” including “remote working and learning, ecommerce, gaming and content streaming” as important factors behind the increase in cloud spend, as well as the use of cloud services in the healthcare and public sector.
