Strategic Intelligence: Cloud Services Sector Scorecard Q1 2025 Update

Strategic Intelligence: Cloud Services Sector Scorecard Q1 2025 Update

Summary

The thematic screen of GlobalData’s cloud services sector scorecard is led by the global hyperscalers Microsoft and IBM, with Alphabet and Amazon also in the top five. 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.

Key Highlights

• On April 2, 2025, the Trump administration announced ‘reciprocal’ tariffs on US imports from over 180 countries. Since then, the tariffs have been put on pause for 90 days, except for 25% tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, 25% tariffs on most imports from Mexico and Canada, and 145% tariffs on most imports from China.
• As of the release date of this report, most cloud services companies are unaffected by the imposed and proposed tariffs. The suggested tariffs are an import tax on goods, not services. As of April 2025, electronics are also exempt from the tariffs. However, this will likely change as the Trump administration prepares additional industry-specific tariffs on smartphones, laptops, and semiconductors.

• 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.

• Companies that invest in the right themes become success stories. Those that miss the important themes in their industry end up as failures.
• GlobalData’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 GlobalData, 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.