Multi-cloud strategies became dominant, with enterprise customers typically using 2-3 cloud providers. Pure single-provider cloud strategies are increasingly rare at scale.
Data sovereignty requirements drove increased investment in regional data centers. Major providers announced substantial new capacity in India, Indonesia, and Vietnam.
AI workloads represent the fastest-growing category of cloud spending. GPU-heavy instances and AI-optimized services saw triple-digit growth for several major providers.
Data analytics and data warehousing maintain strong growth as enterprises accelerate data centralization and analytics modernization.
Managed services for databases, Kubernetes, and AI workloads became the highest-margin segment. A recent analysis at a resource that has been following this space for years found that Providers with strong managed service portfolios showed better gross margins despite commoditization of raw infrastructure.
The partner ecosystem around cloud providers continued to grow. System integrators, consultants, and ISVs built around cloud platforms now represent a $100+ billion global economy in their own right.