Strategic Intelligence: Cloud Services Sector Scorecard Q2 2025 Update

The thematic screen of the analyst’s cloud services sector scorecard is led by the global hyperscalers Microsoft and IBM, with Alphabet and Amazon also in the top five. In partnership with OpenAI and Alphabet, Microsoft is aggressively investing in generative artificial intelligence (AI), developing foundational large language models (LLMs), 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.

Investments in data centers continue to rise as AI training and adoption bolster the need for cloud infrastructure. In the first half of 2025, foreign direct investments (FDI) in data centers surpassed the total value of FDI for 2024, recording $104 billion in H1 2025, compared to $77 billion in 2024, according to the analyst’s FDI database. In July 2025, OpenAI announced it had agreed to rent around 4.5 gigawatts (GW) of cloud capacity from Oracle for $30 billion per year. The deal marks another expansion of OpenAI’s Stargate data center project, launched in January 2025. OpenAI, in partnership with investor SoftBank, has committed to investing over $500 billion to build new data centers globally.

Scope

• 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.

Reasons to Buy

• Companies that invest in the right themes become success stories. Those that miss the important themes in their industry end up as failures.
• The analyst'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.
• The analyst has 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.
• First, we identify the top 10 themes transforming a sector across four categories (tech, macro, industry, and ESG). We also rank themes in order of priority by examining activity levels across 200 million alternative data signals, including patents, jobs, deals, filings, social media, and news.
• Second, we research each theme in detail, examining the value chain, key players, and trends. Additionally, we examine the impact of each theme across the 20 industries we cover. Our 200 million signals help identify the leading adopters of a theme in each sector.
• Finally, using our sector scorecards, we rank the companies most likely to succeed in a sector over the next five years.