Google Cloud captured roughly 15% of the global cloud infrastructure market in the second quarter, a record high and a gain of about two percentage points from a year earlier, according to industry estimates. The advance came as Amazon Web Services, still the market leader at around 28% share, saw its growth rate slow relative to the broader market's expansion.
Analysts point to Google's custom AI silicon and enterprise adoption of Gemini-based tools bundled into Workspace contracts as key drivers of the gain. Microsoft Azure held roughly 20% share, largely flat year over year, leaving the three hyperscalers with somewhere between 63% and 67% of the overall market between them.
Global spending on cloud infrastructure reached an estimated $143 billion in the quarter, up roughly $43 billion from the same period last year, growth driven overwhelmingly by AI training and inference workloads rather than traditional application migration. Even so, cloud waste has ticked up to an estimated 29% of infrastructure spending, the first increase in five years, as companies struggle to forecast and govern fast-growing AI workloads.
AWS, for its part, has been consolidating parts of its service catalog, moving some offerings into maintenance mode as it focuses investment on its highest-demand AI products.
