Wednesday, July 26, 2023

Microsoft and Google both filed their latest quarterly reports on Tuesday, and both reported generally good numbers powering along as usual. Calcbench decided to take a look at one specific line of revenue important to both businesses: cloud computing.

Figure 1, below, compares quarterly cloud computing for the three giants in this sector: Microsoft, Google, and Amazon.com. The winner seems to be Microsoft ($MSFT).  

We cannot be entirely sure of this because Amazon ($AMZN) has not yet filed its Q2 earnings report. But Microsoft is several billion dollars ahead of Amazon, and light years beyond Google ($GOOG). 

Microsoft has seen its cloud revenue nearly double in recent years, from $12.3 billion in Q1 2020 to $24 billion in Q2 2023. Quarter-over-quarter revenue is a bit more zig-zaggy than Google and Amazon, but overall revenue for Microsoft rose 96 percent. 

Amazon’s AWS revenue went from $10.22 billion to $21.35 billion in Q1 2023, an increase of 109 percent; but Amazon started from a lower base than Microsoft and hasn’t caught up yet. Maybe that will change if Amazon reports a huge AWS revenue number this quarter. We’ll have to wait and see. 

Meanwhile, Google’s cloud revenue went from $2.77 billion to $8.03 billion, an increase of 189 percent. That’s a growth rate far more brisk than Microsoft or Amazon, but in absolute dollars Google still trails well behind either of its peers. 

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