The major cloud providers announced earnings last week, and their growth is slowing significantly. What that means, however, isn’t immediately obvious. Earlier this year each of the clouds used the same word to explain the decreased pace: “optimization.” Customers are cutting spending in some areas so they can increase it elsewhere. What is the “elsewhere” claiming CIOs’ budgets?
As first noted by Microsoft (and surprisingly not by Google), the biggest shift in spending is toward artificial intelligence. Back in May, I noted that we’re currently in an “optimization calm before the cloud spending storm” that will hit once companies feel more confident in the AI experiments they’re running.
