Baseball has a saying that a prospect has high ceilings. This is a reference to the immense potential of a young player who still has plenty of room for improvement. This could also be applied to the cloud infrastructure market. It is growing at an incredible rate with no signs of slowing down anytime soon. All major vendors reported, bringing the total market to $42 billion. This is an increase of $2 billion over Q1.Synergy Research reported that revenue increased at a rapid 39% rate, marking the fourth consecutive quarter of growth. AWS was the leader, as usual. However, Microsoft and Google continued to grow at an impressive pace.AWS continues to defy the market logic. AWS actually increased growth by 5% at 37% over the previous quarter, which is an incredible feat for a company that has reached market maturity. This resulted in $14.81 billion of revenue for Amazon's cloud division. That is close to a $60 trillion run rate. It gives it a 33% market share. Although that share has been steady over the years, it continues to rise as the market pie gets larger.Microsoft's growth was even faster at 51%. While Microsoft cloud infrastructure data can be difficult to find, it has 20% market share according to Synergy research. This puts it at $8.4 Billion as it continues to grow with its revenue of $7.8 Billion last quarter.Google also continued to make steady and slow progress under Thomas Kurian's leadership. This was reflected in a 54% increase of cloud revenue in Q2 on $4.2 billion revenue, which is 10% of the market. It marks the first time that Google Cloud has reached double figures according to Synergys quarterly tracking data. This is an increase of $3.5 billion from the previous quarter.After the Big 3, Alibaba maintained its Q1 6% at 6% (but will not report this week). IBM fell a point to 4% from Q1 as Big Blue struggles in pure infrastructure while it transitions to hybrid cloud management.John Dinsdale is chief analyst at Synergy and says the big three are spending huge to fuel this growth. In a statement, he stated that Amazon, Microsoft, and Google collectively invest over $25 billion per quarter in capex. Much of this is going towards equipping their fleets of more than 340 hyperscale data center.Canalys, however, had slightly lower numbers but saw a $47 billion overall market. Their market share was 31% for Amazon, 22% for Microsoft and 8% each for Google.Blake Murray, a Canalys analyst, says companies are shifting their workloads to the cloud to achieve environmental sustainability goals. Cloud vendors are working towards using more renewable energy to power their huge data centers.Murray stated that the best practices and technology used by these companies will be passed on to the rest. Customers will also increasingly use cloud services to meet their sustainability goals and relieve some of their environmental responsibility.No matter if companies move to the cloud in order to save money or to benefit from the sustainability efforts made by the big 3, they are making steady progress towards the cloud. The potential for growth is strong with global cloud usage estimated at 25%. This is despite the fact that there are still many untapped markets outside of the U.S.This bodes well both for the big three, and smaller operators that can tap into large market shares to generate big revenue. Dinsdale stated that there is still a lot of opportunity for smaller cloud providers who are more focused, but it can be difficult to ignore the impressive numbers coming from the big three.It is difficult to imagine a ceiling for these companies in the near future.
