Google’s cloud outpaces rivals in third quarter as AI battle heats up

With Wall Street laser focused on cloud computing this week, Google outpaced its rivals in growth, a key sign for investors that the internet company is gaining traction in artificial intelligence.

Google’s cloud business, which includes infrastructure as well as software subscriptions, grew 35% year over year in the third quarter to $11.35 billion, accelerating from 29% in the prior period.

Amazon Web Services, which remains the market leader, grew 19% to $27.45 billion, meaning it’s more than twice the size of Google Cloud but expanding about half as quickly. Second-place Microsoft said revenue from Azure and other cloud services grew 33% from a year earlier.

Five of the six trillion-dollar tech companies reported results this week, with AI chipmaker Nvidia as the outlier. Amazon, Alphabet and Microsoft always report around the same time, giving investors a snapshot of how the cloud wars are playing out.

“While Alphabet has often been criticized as a Johnny-one-note for its dependence on digital advertising, the rapid growth of Google Cloud has begun to diversify the company’s revenue,” analysts at Argus Research, who recommend buying the stock, wrote in a report on Oct. 31.

For a long time, cloud was a money sink for Google, but that’s no longer the case.

Google reported a 17% cloud operating margin in the third quarter, after first turning a profit last year. It was “a real beat to expectations there,” Melissa Otto, head of technology, media and telecommunications sector research at Visible Alpha, said on CNBC this week. She said she isn’t sure if the company can sustain that level of profitability.

The opposite story has been true at Amazon, which has long counted on AWS for the bulk of total profit.

AWS’ operating margin for the the third quarter was 38%, which analysts at Bernstein described as a “whopping” number. Executives have been careful with hiring and have discontinued less popular AWS services. Also, at the beginning of 2024, Amazon extended the useful life of its servers from five years to six, a change that boosted the operating margin by 200 basis points, or 2 percentage points.

Microsoft this week started giving investors more accurate readings of its Azure public cloud. When the company reported Azure revenue growth in the past, the number would include sales of mobility and security services and Power BI data analytics software. Microsoft, which is the lead investor in ChatGPT creator OpenAI, is getting a hefty boost from AI services.

“Demand continues to be higher than our available capacity,” Amy Hood, Microsoft’s finance chief, said on the company’s earnings call.

While Azure growth in the current quarter will moderate a bit, Hood said it should pick up in the first half of 2025 “as our capital investments create an increase in available AI capacity to serve more of the growing demand.”

Amazon is seeing a similar dynamic.

“I think pretty much everyone today has less capacity than they have demand for, and it’s really primarily chips that are the area where companies could use more supply,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said on his company’s earnings call.

To help ease the burden, Amazon relies to a degree on its own processors, in addition to Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs). Jassy said clients are showing interest in Trainium 2, the company’s second-generation chip for training models.

“We’ve gone back to our manufacturing partners multiple times to produce much more than we’d originally planned,” he said.

Google is now on the sixth generation of its own custom tensor processing units for AI. CEO Sundar Pichai told analysts that he’d been spending time with the TPU team.

“I couldn’t be more excited at the forward-looking roadmap, but all of it allows us to both plan ahead in the future and really drive an optimized architecture for it,” he said.

Microsoft introduced its own AI chip in the cloud, Maia, a year ago. The company has started to use Maia chips to power its own services, but it hasn’t yet made it available for customers to rent out, a spokesperson said.

Analysts at DA Davidson said in a note this week that they don’t see this as a battle Microsoft can win going up against Amazon and Google. They have a neutral rating on Microsoft.

Oracle, which generally ranks fourth among U.S. cloud infrastructure companies, is expected to report quarterly results in December. In its last report, Oracle said cloud infrastructure revenue jumped 45% to $2.2 billion, up from 42% growth in the prior quarter.

Oracle recently partnered with its three bigger cloud rivals to make its databases available on their services, a move that Chairman Larry Ellison said on the last earnings calls, “will turbocharge the growth of our database business for years to come.”