Hyperscalers are investing billions of dollars into artificial intelligence (AI) hoping to get a leg up on what’s expected to be the future driver of cloud infrastructure, but which of the big three – Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) – is garnering early results?

A recent report from IoT Analytics found each of those heavyweight hyperscalers can claim some early success.

Microsoft was found to have added the most AI case studies, including a continued dominant position in the generative AI (genAI) cloud space. IoT Analytics research found Microsoft led 45% of all new cloud AI case studies and a more dominating 62% of genAI-focused case studies, which the research firm noted has been helped by Microsoft’s close work with OpenAI.

AWS has found success with what IoT Analystics terms “traditional AI case studies,” which excludes genAI. The cloud giant led just 15% of total new AI case studies tracked by IoT Analytics, but 85% of those case studies were not based on genAI.

“As AWS further develops its cloud AI offerings (especially genAI), it could start upselling these services to its current and new customer base, see more cloud AI projects, and gain a larger share of new projects,” IoT Analytics Senior Analyst Dimitris Paraskevopoulos wrote.

Google lags behind its larger rivals in overall cloud AI engagements, but the hyperscaler has been able to integrate AI into more of its cloud wins. IoT Analytics found that “36% of Google’s new public cloud case studies make use of a cloud AI product, implying that AI is a bigger driver for Google Cloud than it is for any of the other hyperscalers.”

Who is over-indexing on cloud AI? IoT analytics also noted that Microsoft’s AI engagements was over performing its overall cloud market share. The hyperscalers total cloud AI engagement was 16 percentage points higher than the 29% overall market share IoT Analytics attributed to Microsoft, while its genAI engagement was more than double that overall market share.

Google Cloud also outperformed its total market share, with overall AI cloud engagement a robust 8 percentage points higher than its 9% total cloud market share, and genAI engagement 9 percentage points higher than that overall cloud market share.

AWS, on the other hand, generated substantially lower engagements compared to its overall cloud market leadership, with cloud AI engagements 3 percentage points lower than its 37% total cloud market share, and genAI engagements 21 percentage points lower.

Despite that numbers shortfall, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy did note during the hyperscaler’s most recent earnings call that its AI business “is a multibillion-dollar revenue run rate business that continues to grow at a triple-digit, year-over-year percentage and is growing more than three-times faster at this stage of its evolution as AWS itself grew, and we felt like AWS grew pretty quickly.”

IoT Analytics’ Paraskevopoulos noted that these results are important for ecosystem vendors in that they highlight the current competitive landscape, while cloud AI adopters can be informed on how different vendors are performing in the space.

AI demand driving cloud spend This demand is also driving a significant chunk of infrastructure spend for hyperscalers.

Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky during the company’s earnings call said it would spend $75 billion this year on capex. “The majority of the spend is to support the growing need for technology infrastructure,” Olsavsky explained. “This primarily relates to AWS as we invest to support demand for our AI services.”

Synergy Research Group (SRG) in its latest ranking of cloud market share, noted overall enterprise spend on cloud infrastructure surged 23% year over year during Q3, hitting $84 billion for the quarter. This includes spending on infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and hosted private cloud services.

Other vendors taking a piece of that pie include Oracle, Huawei, Snowflake, and Cloudflare.

SRG pinned the surge in cloud revenues on increased investment in artificial intelligence (AI) and its generative AI (genAI) appendage, which have overcome lingering “economic, currency, and political headwinds.”

“While some market headwinds have diminished, it is undoubtedly AI that is a prime factor behind this increased growth rate,” SRG Chief Analyst John Dinsdale explained. “New AI-oriented services and technology are helping the major cloud providers to ride a wave – new capabilities lead to increased demand, which leads to increased revenues, which then enables more investment in underlying technologies.”

The cloud giants have been investing in that opportunity, with a previous SRG report finding AWS, Microsoft, and GCP were in the midst of a data center expansion spree that will see them control nearly two-thirds of all data center capacity worldwide by the end of this decade, which is eight-times the capacity they controlled in 2017.

ABI Research noted in its own report that this AI-fueled investment spree will also angle toward “large and mega-sized colocation facilities.” The firm noted that 28% of total worldwide data centers currently fit this size definition, but that “number will grow to 43% by 2030 as companies build larger data centers that can accommodate AI/generative AI workloads and other data-hungry applications.”

IoT Analytics did add that enterprise appetite for AI applications would be “pivotal” in garnering hyperscaler attention, those enterprises remain most transfixed on security. “Cybersecurity has been and is expected to remain the top priority for the foreseeable future,” Paraskevopoulos wrote.