Synergy Research Group stated generative AI (GenAI) technology and services helped boost global Q4 2023 enterprise spending on cloud infrastructure services to close to $74 billion, up by more than $12 billion year-on-year.

The research company noted growth of 20 per cent was markedly higher than the previous three quarters.

Synergy Research Group noted a clear contribution of GenAI technology and services to raising cloud spending, with the figure also benefitting from easing economic, currency and political headwinds.

With most cloud providers releasing their Q4 2023 earnings, Synergy Research Group estimates quarterly cloud infrastructure service revenue including IaaS, PaaS and hosted private cloud services was $73.7 billion.

Google and Microsoft had the stronger growth numbers, with the latter increasing its market share by almost two percentage points to 11 per cent.

Amazon’s share dropped to 31 per cent despite double-digit growth rates, with Google on 24 per cent.

The top-three cloud providers accounted for 67 per cent of the global market.

Their dominance is even more pronounced in public cloud, where they account for 73 per cent.

Tier-two cloud providers Huawei, China Telecom, Snowflake, MongoDB, Oracle and VMware posted the highest yearly growth rates.

The research company noted the cloud sector is unlikely to return to the high growth rates posted before 2022, but predicted stable gains and that the annual market would reach $500 billion soon.

For 2023, sales grew 19 per cent to $270 billion.