Top Cloud Computing Stocks to Invest in for (2025)

The Evolution of Cloud Computing

Historically, the first computers used commercially were massive mainframes, computers large enough to fill entire rooms. They progressively became more powerful as technology improved, but the general architecture of large computing facilities stayed the same: larger server rooms handled internally by universities, research institutes, and large corporations.

Source: Orkes

This started to change in the 2000s, when Internet connections allowed for a more decentralized computing architecture. Instead of having to connect to a computer on-site, professionals could just send requests to a database far away and get the answer they needed.

Progressively, the idea emerged that if the servers can be managed at a distance, they also could be subcontracted to service providers instead of keeping this activity in-house, creating the cloud computing industry.

Cloud computing centralizes massive data centers in one place and then sells the capacity to multiple clients. This allows for sharing economies of scale, reducing the need for infrastructure and experts on the user side, and providing more flexibility for variable computing demand.

Source: Cloud Defense

As every business activity is digitalized, the demand for cloud computing has exploded, and is still quickly rising today. Cloud computing was a $752B market in 2024, and is expected to grow to an astonishing $2.39T by 2030, or a 20.4% CAGR.

Source: Grand View Research

The largest customer for the world market is banking, finance, services, and insurance industry (BFSI), followed by IT & Telecom companies, but also ultimately every segment of the economy.

Source: Grand View Research

A strong driver of higher demand for cloud computing is the rise of AI services and AI tools being deployed. This drives both the need to digitalize more activities and create more usable data, and the need for more computing power to run the AIs.

5 Best Cloud Computing Companies

1. Amazon

Early on in its history, Amazon started to build giant data centers to service its ever-increasing need for more capacity to feed its growing e-commerce empire. So, in parallel to massive warehouses and distribution centers, it quickly became a massive IT company as well, although only servicing its own internal “clients”.

When building this infrastructure, Amazon started to build a lot more tools and in-house systems to handle the increasingly complex cloud infrastructure supporting its activities. It realized that it could start providing the same systems as a service as early as 2002. To do so, it launched Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Source: Zoho

This way, Amazon could provide to many other online companies the tools it had invented for itself. This also gave Amazon a larger scale, with the AWS clients now “subsidizing” the development of systems and tools it would need to create for itself anyway.

This created economies of scale, reducing Amazon’s IT costs and allowing the e-commerce segment to become even cheaper, reinforcing its main competitive advantage: low prices.

Along the way since its inception, AWS has become the gold standard of cloud services, and also by far the most profitable segment of the company.

While AWS gives Amazon only 16% of the company’s revenues, this division is responsible for 74% of the company’s operating income, as cloud services are much more profitable than e-commerce, with an operating margin of 30.3% (e-commerce operating margin is just 1.8%).

Today, Amazon is the world’s largest cloud provider, controlling almost 1/3^rd of the global market.

Source: Statista

Amazon cloud services are still growing quickly. To this day, Amazon is investing massively in AWS, notably with a $10B investment in Ohio.

The company is also signing deals with nuclear Small Modular Reactor (SMR) startups for future low-carbon energy production to power its AWS servers and AI data centers, a global trend among the largest tech companies initiated by Microsoft.

Cloud computing has progressively become one of the core of what was initially “only” the world’s largest e-commerce company. However, investors should also pay attention to the many other activities of Amazon:

• Prime streaming services and movie-making (Amazon owns MGM Studios).
• Ads and services.
• Logistics, drones, and robots.
• IoT, including Alexa, FireTV, Echo smart speakers, and Ring doorbells.
• Internet constellation, with Project Kuiper competing with Elon Musk’s Starlink.
• AI tools and self-driving taxis Zoox.

Overall, Amazon is becoming a true futuristic mega-corporation, with a solid grip on retail, cloud computing, and aggressively investing in new markets like self-driving taxis, advanced autonomous systems, and even space infrastructures.

So while cloud computing might be why someone will invest in the company today, they should also pay attention to these potentially equally lucrative new ventures.

(You can also read a more detailed analysis of Amazon’s history and many business activities in our investment report dedicated to the company.)

2. Microsoft

Microsoft is not necessarily a company that non-experts think of when they discuss advanced IT and cloud computing. However, the 20% global market share it enjoys in the global cloud computing segment (with the Azure service) would beg to differ.

Source: Statista

This difference between this public perception and Microsoft’s actual performance mostly stems from the fact that many of the Microsoft products people interact with are different and more consumer-focused: Windows OS, Office Suite, Xbox gaming console, etc.

But the company is also a leader in B2B services, having specialized in becoming the global digital “center of white collar jobs”.

Far from just providing Office, Microsoft 365 offers multiple other associated services besides the original Office offerings, like company calls (Teams), cloud-shared storage (OneDrive), Visio (diagrams, charts), Loop (collaborative workspace), and Access (database).

For example, Teams is #2 in the remote meeting market, only behind market leader Zoom (ZM -1.09%).

Source: Bitget

Microsoft is also a major cybersecurity provider, the world’s largest endpoint cybersecurity provider, ahead of CrowdStrike (CRWD +1.64%) and much larger than any other smaller providers.

Source: Microsoft

Microsoft owns GitHub, the world’s leading software development platform with more than 90 million developers/users, up from just 28 million when acquired in 2018. It also owns LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional social network, and a gold mine of data for HR services and to train B2B AIs.

Microsoft is making quick progress with AI (Copilot) and its integration in daily work routines. It is even venturing into quantum computing, having recently announced the invention of an entirely new state of matter (topological state) with its Majorana-1 chips.

Altogether, this points at Microsoft as a very important cloud computing provider for a large segment of the world’s collar professionals, with growing synergies between Windows, Copilot AI, Microsoft 365 softwares, cybersecurity services, GitHub, LinkedIn, etc.

The stronger these synergies become, the more Microsoft users will be locked in a closed ecosystem providing all they need to perform their work, solidify the company’s lead in cloud computing, and B2B IT services in general.

(You can also read a more detailed analysis of Microsoft’s history and many business activities in our investment report dedicated to the company.)

 3. Alibaba

Investors in tech stocks are often very focused on the US companies, due to the outstanding success of the sector, both domestically and globally. But there is one market where domestic champions have emerged and managed to succeed at a scale comparable to American companies: China.

Following the path opened by Amazon with WAS, the e-commerce giant Alibaba has also made strong moves into the cloud computing sector. In its domestic market, Alibaba is very much the equivalent of Amazon globally, controlling more than 1/3^rd of the market, followed only by privately held Huawei and Tencent.

Source: Jeff Townson

The overall Chinese cloud market is growing very quickly, leading to Alibaba Cloud growing at a double-digit percentage.

While Alibaba and other Chinese e-commerce companies are becoming less relevant in the USA due to Trump’s tariffs, this is not true in the rest of the world.

For example, Alibaba has been Europe’s biggest online marketplace since 2023, and its dominance is only challenged by fellow Chinese retailer Pinduoduo (PDD -0.14%) (Temu).

International online sales have seen a 32% year-to-year growth and an even stronger performance in selected markets in Europe and the Gulf Region.

A strong point of Alibaba is its adoption of AI in cloud computing, as well as its triple-digit year-over-year growth in the adoption of its AI tools.

The AI push includes generative AI like LLMs (Large Language Models), but also custom apps, and has cut costs by half, making them a lot more affordable to customers.

Alibaba’s AI ambitions are large, with the triple goals of:

1. Developing its own “foundational models for AI and progress towards AGI”.
2. Integrate their LLM within every Alibaba operation as well as all its customers (from buyers to merchants), creating scale and cost-efficient AI functionalities.
3. Using its proprietary LLM, Tongyi Qianwen 2.0, launched at the end of 2023, through industry-specific models.

Alibaba moves into AI, notably with the launch of a competitor to DeepSeek, which comes with a massive investment program of $52.4B in its AI and cloud computing infrastructure over the next three years.

So Alibaba cloud computing business is today inseparable from its AI activities, notably with Alibaba Cloud for Generative AI, Smart Studio, and Alibaba Cloud AI and Data Intelligence.

Alibaba is likely to become one of China’s dominant cloud computing and AI companies, and use its position in e-commerce over the world to take market share in the international market ex-USA as well.

However, it is a stock that is always at the risk of falling in the crossfire between the American and Chinese governments’ trade wars and geopolitical rivalry. So investors will want to consider whether they prefer buying the shares listed in the US stock market or the Hong Kong listing (9988.HK).

(You can also read a more detailed analysis of Microsoft’s history and many business activities in our investment report dedicated to the company.)

4. Oracle

Most cloud computing companies built their cloud business on the back of a strong presence in other fields, be it e-commerce, operating systems, or B2B software.

This is the case of Oracle, which has been from inception focused on “relational database management systems (RDBMS).”

In 1983, Oracle Version 3 was released, and it was the first commercially available RDBMS to support SQL, still today the main programming language for handling large databases.

Oracle is building its own large-scale cloud infrastructure, with a focus on high geographical diversity to help create quick and localized data storage. The company has moved from just 5 services and 1,000 customers in 2016 to 192 services and 25,000 customers in 2024.

Source: Oracle

The company is planning to keep expanding its cloud capacities through a large $15B capital expenditure in 2025.

Source: Oracle

The company’s central position in database management means that Oracle also benefits from more digitalization and migration to the cloud, even when not using its own infrastructure, as Oracle’s products can easily be deployed to other providers’ hardware and servers.

In 2023, cloud services generated 13% of Oracle’s total revenues. This is a segment that exploded, with 51% year-to-year growth in 2024.

Oracle is also at the center of the US government’s “Project Stargate”, a $500B initiative for building data centers, making it, according to the US president, “the largest AI infrastructure project, by far, in history.” The announcement was made with Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, Masayoshi Son of SoftBank, and Sam Altman of OpenAI on the side of the US President.

Source: AP News

Ellison pointed out that the data centers are already under construction, with 10 being built so far. In total, 20 are planned, and the initiative should create 100,000 jobs.

“We just signed an agreement with Meta—for them to use Oracle’s AI Cloud Infrastructure—and collaborate with Oracle on the development of AI Agents based on Meta’s Llama models.

The Oracle Cloud trains dozens of specialized AI models and embeds hundreds of AI Agents in cloud applications.

Larry Ellison, Oracle Chairman and CTO.

Investors should understand that Oracle is not the largest cloud provider in the world, with tech giants holding a solid lead over the sector.

It is, however, a key provider of vital infrastructures and software to the cloud computing industry, especially in database management tools.

So while Oracle’s proprietary cloud computing data centers can bring extra margins, as long as the industry keeps growing at 20%, Oracle will be one of the main beneficiaries of this trend.

(You can also read a more detailed analysis of Oracle’s history and many business activities in our investment report dedicated to the company.)

5. CoreWeave

The growth of the cloud computing industry has, for a long time, been driven by the double trend of migrating in-house systems to the cloud and the digitalization of the whole economy.

As a result, large data warehouses and easy-to-access servers are at the center of the industry.

With the rise of AI training, which is very demanding in total computing capacity, a different type of data center is emerging. This idea of providing on-demand compute capacity for AI training is the central idea behind CoreWeave’s current business model.

The company started as a “Compute-as-a-Service” for the cryptocurrency industry, using GPUs (Graphics Processing Units).

In 2019, it moved on to a more generalized cloud offer, still specialized in GPU-based calculation, as this type of hardware was found to be ideal for neural network training and other types of calculation used to create better AIs.

In 2024, CoreWeave made around $2B in revenue and has a very aggressive growth target of $8B for 2025. It IPOed at the end of March 2025.

Source: CoreWeave

Not only can CoreWeave provide general GPU-based computing capacity, but it has also developed the expertise to build custom data centers for AI companies, matching specific types of AI models.

Because CoreWeave is focused on accumulating as much GPU capacity as possible, it is not a potential future competitor to chip makers like Nvidia, contrary to Amazon for example. This has so far helped CoreWeave get access to more GPUs than its competitors, especially advanced chips experiencing shortages.

Overall, CoreWeave is a new type of large cloud computing company, where computing capacity replaces integration of business operations, driven by both cryptocurrencies and AI technologies.

(You can also read a more detailed analysis of CoreWeave’s history and many business activities in our investment report dedicated to the company, written just before its very successful IPO.)