Strategic Intelligence: Cloud Services Sector Scorecard Q3 2024 Update

The thematic screen of the analyst’s cloud services sector scorecard is led by the global hyperscalers Microsoft and Amazon, with Alphabet and IBM also in the top 10. Microsoft, in partnership with OpenAI, and Alphabet are aggressively investing in generative artificial intelligence (AI), developing foundational large language models (LLM), and building the infrastructure to offer related services to customers. However, the long-term cloud services model remains unclear, as several vendors, spearheaded by Meta, Mistral AI, H20.ai, and Databricks, are open-sourcing their LLMs.

Growth in AI has significantly increased the demand for data processing capabilities and capacity, leading to the expansion of data centers globally. According to the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, energy growth estimates for the next five years were revised to 4.7% from 2.6% in 2022. The regulator attributed increases in demand to the AI boom and electrification. Water consumption for cooling servers has also skyrocketed amid water scarcity concerns. As energy and water consumption increase, data centers pose a more severe environmental challenge, increasingly contributing to higher CO2 emissions. Initiatives to make data centers more sustainable include increased use of renewables, more effective cooling technologies, and design optimization.

Scope

• This sector scorecard provides a top-down, comprehensive outlook for the key players in the cloud services sector over the next two years, based on the key themes set to transform their industry landscape.

Reasons to Buy

• Companies that invest in the right themes become success stories. Those that miss the important themes in their industry end up as failures.
• The analyst’s thematic research ecosystem is a single, integrated global research platform that provides an easy-to-use framework for tracking all themes across all companies in all sectors. It has a proven track record of identifying the important themes early, enabling companies to make the right investments ahead of the competition, and secure that all-important competitive advantage.
• At the analyst, we have developed a unique thematic methodology for ranking all major companies in all major sectors based on their relative strength in the big themes that are impacting their industries.
• Our thematic engine tags over 180 million data items across six alternative data sets-patents, jobs, deals, filings, social media, and news-to themes. The vast datasets within our thematic engine help our analysts to produce sector scorecards that identify the companies best placed to succeed in a future filled with multiple disruptive threats.