While Microsoft Azure has been the market’s darling for AI-driven growth, largely thanks to its cozy relationship with OpenAI, analysts now expect Amazon Web Services to deliver superior returns on its AI capital expenditures over the coming years.
The numbers behind the shift
AWS currently commands roughly 30% of cloud infrastructure market share, compared to Microsoft’s approximately 21%. That gap has been a durable feature of the cloud landscape for years, even as Azure has posted faster revenue growth rates, often in the 30-40% year-over-year range.
Microsoft’s growth advantage has been largely attributed to its OpenAI integration, which turned Azure into the default on-ramp for enterprises experimenting with generative AI.
Amazon has announced plans to allocate $75 billion in capital expenditures for 2024, with AI infrastructure as the primary focus. AWS Bedrock, its managed AI service, reported 170% quarter-over-quarter customer spend growth in Q1 2026, with token volumes exceeding all previous totals.
