The growth of public cloud companies has been phenomenal and looks set to continue, with annual growth rates of around 20% being fuelled – in the mid-term – by AI investments. The growth projections are solid and consistent, with Gartner pegging worldwide public cloud end-user spending at $723 billion this year (2025) – an increase of 21% from $595.7 billion in 2024 - and IDC estimating public cloud services spending in Europe will total $229 billion this year and reach $452 billion by 2029 – a CAGR of 19%.
► AI-driven growth of public cloud set to continue as hyperscalers invest
► Nine out of ten businesses will be on hybrid cloud within two years
It is no surprise that this growth is being driven by AI at present. The question looking ahead is whether AI will continue to be the main factor in sustaining the momentum of cloud growth? If not, will the public cloud continue to grow regardless?
There may be some clues in other Gartner research. The embedding of AI in cloud services is going to be a big factor over the next few years, the firm says, as vendors look to differentiate their offerings. In a separate study, the analyst has predicted that 50% of cloud compute resources will be devoted to AI workloads by 2029, compared to less than 10% today. The use of AI will also become more vertically focused; Gartner predicts that by 2030, over 80% of organisations will have deployed industry-specific AI agents (also up from less than 10% today).
All this would suggest that AI will keep driving public cloud growth for some time to come and that infrastructures will be hybrid and make use of multiple clouds. Gartner predicts 90% of organisations will adopt a hybrid cloud approach by the end of 2027.
It’s not all about AI though – security is also driving cloud uptake. IDC has said significant spending on security software can be expected by European federal and central governments and in heavily regulated industries such as finance and healthcare.
Public cloud can thus be expected to keep growing and for channel partners that have sufficient expertise in the leading hyperscalers, and are able to offer services around the management, migration, orchestration and optimisation of services, the prospects look bright.
As the market develops, the support available from TD SYNNEX’s dedicated teams for AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud could become even more important for partners, as will the StreamOne aggregation platform. Find out more about our cloud services and solutions.
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