Microsoft led the 2022 public cloud ecosystem in revenue, followed by Amazon Web Services (AWS), Salesforce, and Google, according to a new report from Synergy Research Group (SRG).

Microsoft in its most recent earnings call reported $52.7 billion in quarterly revenue and $27 billion in cloud services revenue. During the call, CEO Satya Nadella promised investors artificial intelligence (AI) will be the next major wave of compute, which explains the hyperscaler's recent multibillion-dollar investments in OpenAI.

SRG Analyst John Dinsdale told SDxCentral that AI is "a big focus for all of the leading companies" and drives "a lot of investment, product development, and revenues across the board," but he wouldn't "go so far to say that it is a rising tide that is lifting all boats."

He also noted the recent layoffs at the top four cloud providers have been almost wholly focused on the "non-cloud components" of their operations.

SRG's report found public cloud service and infrastructure markets, including cloud operator and vendor revenues, totaled $544 billion in revenues last year. That represents 21% growth from 2021.

The largest segment of growth was infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS). Despite “major headwinds” like the strengthening U.S. dollar and issues in the Chinese market, IaaS and PaaS revenue jumped 29% to $195 billion in 2022.

Other significant market players outside of the top four include Adobe, Alibaba, Cisco, Dell, Digital Realty, Huawei, IBM, Inspur, Oracle, SAP, and VMware. These companies represented 60% of last year’s public cloud spend, according to SRG.

The firm's market forecast data predicts public cloud revenues will continue to rise – doubling during the next four years. In that same period, SRG expects the major cloud providers will increase their amount of hyperscale data centers by 50% and increase data center network capacity by more than 65%. AWS currently leads its rivals Microsoft and Google in number of data centers and data center network capacity.