Amazon: The Cloud Rival That Got There FirstNarrow moat

Amazon Web Services invented the cloud business and spent a decade unchallenged in it, which is why Microsoft's cloud story is a comeback rather than a conquest. By mid-2026 AWS still held roughly 28% of global cloud infrastructure against Azure's 21%¹ — but Azure has been growing faster for years, and the distance has been closing steadily rather than dramatically.

Microsoft's advantage was never technical. It was that the customers were already customers: the enterprise that licenses Windows Server, Office and SQL Server buys Azure on the same agreement, from the same salesforce, with credits that make the migration cheap. AWS has to win each account on merit; Microsoft frequently only has to be good enough on a contract that is being renewed anyway. That is the enterprise relationship converted into cloud share, and it is why second place has been so profitable.

What complicates the comparison now is that both are being outgrown by the smallest of the three, and that enterprises increasingly refuse to choose — multi-cloud is the norm rather than the exception, which caps how much any one provider can lock in. Watch Azure's growth rate against AWS's rather than the share numbers, since share moves slowly and growth is where the future position is being set. Azure growing meaningfully faster is the whole bull case; convergence would mean the comeback has run its course.