Worldwide cloud infrastructure services spending grew 23% in Q4 2022

Worldwide cloud infrastructure services expenditure grew 23% YoY, an increase of $12.3 billion in Q4 2022 to reach $65.8 billion, according to a report by Canalys.

However, the quarterly growth rate slumped by over 10% from Q1 2022 (34% in Q1 2022 against 23% in Q4 2022) amid worsening macroeconomic conditions and a looming recession that prompted a slowdown in the pace of migration to the cloud in the quarter, especially by enterprise customers with typically larger workloads.

In the quarter the top three cloud service providers, AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, collectively grew 26%, to account for a combined 65% share of customer spend.

AWS led the cloud infrastructure services market in Q4 2022, accounting for 32% of the total spend as it witnessed an all-time low growth rate of 20% on an annual basis, while Microsoft Azure held 23% of the global cloud infrastructure services market and remained the second-largest provider after growing 31% year on year

Google Cloud was the third largest cloud service provider and outpaced both AWS and Azure with a growth of 36% YoY to account for 10% of the market.

According to an outlook by Canalys analysts, global cloud infrastructure services spending is expected to increase by 23% for the full year in 2023, a slowdown from full-year 2022, where spending grew 29% to US$247.1 billion, up from US$191.7 billion in 2021.