[kkielhofner]

I have - and the numbers show that much of the big cloud growth is in AI services. The "we need to throw in AI somewhere" concurrent trend is heavily bolstering what would other wise be much more drastic retractions in growth.

I would argue as the AI trend (eventually) wanes and many AI startups and projects within existing companies inevitably eventually fail to materialize the much longer and more general trend of migration out of $BIGCLOUD will be more drastic and obvious.

I don't buy individual stocks but I would happily bet a dinner on big cloud growth showing substantial reductions/losses in coming years as the overall situation stabilizes.

[ctvo]

> I have - and the numbers show that much of the big cloud growth is in AI services. The "we need to throw in AI somewhere" concurrent trend is heavily bolstering what would other wise be much more drastic retractions in growth.

Can you share where you got this? Which numbers? I didn't think AWS (or any cloud provider) released details of their operation at that level of granularity.

[kkielhofner]

While the clouds don't break-out revenue numbers at that level of granularity the communication from many of the big cloud providers (to the investment/financial communities at least) acknowledges lower than expected revenue growth overall while pointing to the explosion in "AI" (ML) as a rapidly growing area that will (hopefully, to them) turn that ship around - with already realized promise. I tend to agree with this (obviously).

As one example, the headline here is actually "Microsoft points to AI to drive the next wave of cloud, revenues"[0]. While not hard revenue breakout numbers Microsoft is investing heavily in OpenAI and rapidly (already) integrating it everywhere they can - search, Azure, etc. The investment, utilization, and published pricing are the numbers I'm talking about here.

The real hard numbers and position that supports my thesis (unsurprisingly) comes from Nvidia[1]. Since at least May 2022 Nvidia has been touting their revenues attributed to big cloud demand. Interestingly, Nvidia is rapidly moving to disintermediating big cloud in launching their own "AI cloud"[2]. It's going to be interesting to see how that shakes out...

Google has also been caught somewhat flat-footed and is simultaneously investing even more in "AI" with what will almost certainly be significant revenue opportunity with GCP. I don't follow AWS as closely but I don't see how they could be excluded from this trend - other than having first-mover advantage in cloud services with many more (at this point legacy) customers forever trapped in AWS.

I tend not to try to prognosticate on things like this but it's one of the rare instances I'm very confident in my thesis here. Obviously I'm just some random HN guy but like I said I'd make a friendly bet here.

People need to remember AWS is over 20 years old. There's not a good historical track record of any computing platform/architecture/approach maintaining a strangle hold much longer than that (except maybe Windows, which I'm not sure is comparable).

[0] - https://archive.is/tKLOz

[1] - https://www.reuters.com/technology/nvidia-forecasts-fourth-q...

[2] - https://www.crn.com/news/components-peripherals/nvidia-tease...