Three companies own two-thirds of the cloud
When we build on top of the hyperscalers, AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure, how that market splits matters more to our costs than we usually notice. We’ll walk through the numbers and what they mean for whoever’s footing the cloud bill.
How concentrated it is
Synergy Research puts AWS at around 30 per cent of global cloud infrastructure, Azure at about 22, and Google Cloud at 13, so the three together hold close to two-thirds of the market. No other provider reaches even 4 per cent. The market isn’t small or slowing either: spend hit 129 billion dollars in the first quarter of 2026 alone, up 35 per cent on the year. What keeps the share this stable is the cost of competing. Building data centres at that scale costs hundreds of billions a year, a sum only the biggest players can afford, which is why almost nobody new breaks in.
What it costs you
Most people focus on the monthly bill. The number that matters more is what it would cost to leave. Data egress fees, the charge for moving your data out, have long run to thousands of euros for a large estate, enough to make switching a project nobody wants to start. The deeper lock-in isn’t priced at all: the proprietary APIs and vendor-specific data formats your system is wired into. Re-engineering around those is what leaving costs you.
The outage side of it
Concentration is a resilience question too. Most of that spend lands in the same handful of regions, so when one provider or one region has a bad day, a large part of the internet has one too. If your whole product sits in a single region on a single provider, your uptime is theirs, and you inherit every outage they have.
What changes in 2027
There’s a real shift coming for EU customers. From 12 January 2027, the EU Data Act bans switching charges and egress fees outright for any provider serving EU customers, across infrastructure, platform, and software services. Providers will have to support a move within 30 days, stretchable to seven months only where a move is technically hard. The big three already dropped egress fees for full exits back in 2024. The law takes away the money side of leaving. The engineering side, the APIs and formats that take work to unpick, is still yours to handle.
What to do with all this
You don’t have to leave your provider over any of this. The point is to know your position before you need to. Find out which proprietary APIs and data formats you depend on, because that is your real switching cost. Stay portable where it’s cheap to, standard formats and containers, so a move stays an option rather than a rebuild. And if you’re in the EU, look at your contracts now: an auto-renewal that rolls past January 2027 can lock you into the old terms, so the teams that gain from the change are the ones that planned for it.
