IaaS Public Cloud Services Market Grew 41.4 Percent in 2021

The worldwide infrastructure as a service (IaaS) market grew 41.4% in 2021, to a total of $90.9 billion, up from $64.3 billion in 2020, according to Gartner. Amazon retained the No. 1 position, followed by Microsoft, Alibaba, Google, and Huawei.

“The IaaS market continues to grow unabated as cloud-native becomes the primary architecture for modern workloads,“ said Sid Nag, VP analyst at Gartner. “Cloud supports the scalability and composability that advanced technologies and applications require, while also enabling enterprises to address emerging needs such as sovereignty, data integration, and enhanced customer experience.“

In 2021, the top five IaaS providers accounted for over 80% of the market. Amazon continued to lead the worldwide IaaS market with revenue of $35.4 billion in 2021 and a 38.9% market share. Microsoft followed in the No. 2 position with a 21.1% share and above-market growth, reaching over $19 billion in IaaS revenue in 2021. Alibaba was again the No. 3 IaaS public cloud provider worldwide with a 9.5% market share and revenue of $8.7 billion for 2021. Google Cloud saw the highest growth rate of the top five IaaS vendors, growing 63.7% in 2021 to reach $6.4 billion in revenue. While Huawei’s growth tempered in 2021 after two straight years of over 200% growth, it still maintained the No. 5 market share position with $4.2 billion in revenue.

“The next phase of IaaS growth will be driven by customer experience, digital outcomes, and the virtual-first world,“ said Nag. “Emerging technologies that can help businesses bring experiences closer to their customers, such as the metaverse, chatbots, and digital twins, will require hyper-scale infrastructure to meet growing demands for compute and storage power.“