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.
