tl:dr Not much excitement this quarter
Q3 cloud CAPEX numbers are in (Q2 was tracked on Twitter):
Amazon corporate CAPEX (which includes purchases of property and equipment, as well as property and equipment acquired under finance leases and build-to-suit leases, but not operating leases; AWS is very likely a minority fraction of this total) continued to boom (airplanes, trucks, distribution centers, satellite constellations, etc.), while Google and Microsoft at the corporate level were basically flat quarter-to-quarter. Google was down year-to-year while Microsoft was up.
I think the best tell for cloud infrastructure-specific CAPEX are finance leases (but Google doesn’t use them) which are likely server purchases:
After both Amazon and Microsoft saw big drops in Q1 (“supply chain constraints”) followed by healthy rebounds in Q2, Amazon was up modestly in Q3 while Microsoft declined.
And on the general cloud (IaaS + PaaS + whatever Google is currently calling Google Docs) front:
AWS growth was flat quarter-to-quarter and down 6 points from a year ago. Both Google and Microsoft accelerated quarter-to-quarter by 2 points and 1 point respectively. I assume Google performance is due to the new and critically acclaimed Google Docs icons, but Google Cloud is still getting outgrown by Azure.
You can share more of my CAPEX obsession here.