Cloud computing has been a promising investment theme in recent years. As NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang said on a recent conference call, "The basic computing elements are now storage servers, CPU servers, and GPU servers and are composed and orchestrated by hyperscale applications that are serving millions of users simultaneously."
Research firm Gartner previously forecast that the total cloud computing market will grow 17% this year to reach $266 billion, and that was before a global pandemic accelerated the trend. There are a number of different markets within the broader cloud market. Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) is the leader in the enterprise software-as-a-service (SaaS) segment with commercial products like Microsoft 365.
However, the cloud infrastructure services market is where the heavyweights such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure are knocking heads. Cloud infrastructure services, including what's known as infrastructure as a service (IaaS), are growing faster than SaaS. Microsoft and Alibaba (NYSE: BABA) are two of the largest providers in the world, and both are gaining market share.