AWS Stays Ahead as Cloud Market Accelerates

Amazon's share price jumped 4 percent on Monday after the company announced $38 billion partnership with OpenAI that will help its cloud arm Amazon Web Services (AWS) stay ahead of the competition. The multi-year partnership enables OpenAI to run its AI workloads on AWS's cloud infrastructure, giving the ChatGPT parent access to hundreds of thousands of Nvidia GPUs. "As OpenAI continues to push the boundaries of what's possible, AWS's best-in-class infrastructure will serve as a backbone for their AI ambitions," Matt Garman, CEO of AWS, said in a statement, while OpenAI CEO Sam Altman hailed the partnership for strengthening his company's "broad compute ecosystem that will power this next era and bring advanced AI to everyone."

After having established itself as an early leader in the market for cloud infrastructure, AWS is still ahead of the pack. According to estimates from Synergy Research Group, Amazon’s market share in the worldwide cloud infrastructure market amounted to 29 percent in the third quarter of 2025, ahead of Microsoft's Azure platform at 20 percent and Google Cloud at 13 percent. Together, the "Big Three" account for more than 60 percent of the ever-growing cloud market, with the rest of the competition stuck in the low single digits. For Amazon, AWS has been a key driver of profitability and the perfect addition to its low-margin core retail business. In the first nine months of 2025, Amazon's cloud business accounted for 18 percent of the company's total sales but for 60 percent of operating profit. At more than $100 billion in annual revenue and $40 billion in operating profit, AWS is a key and sometimes overlooked component of Amazon's success.

In Q3 2025, global cloud infrastructure service spending grew $23 billion or 28 percent compared to the third quarter of 2024, bringing total spending to $107 billion for the three months ended September 30. Looking at the full year 2025, cloud infrastructure service revenues will exceed $400 billion for the first time, explaining why the market is so fiercely contested. Despite its size, the cloud market is still growing strongly, with year-over-year growth even re-accelerating in recent quarters, mainly thanks to the AI boom and the computing requirements that come with it.

"Q3 market numbers were simply very impressive with a record-breaking sequential increase and yet another jump in growth rates," John Dinsdale, chief analyst at Synergy Research Group said. In other words: "this is a good time to be a cloud provider," as Dinsdale pointed out three months ago.