In the fourth quarter of 2021, businesses spent $53.5 billion on cloud infrastructure globally, surpassing the $50 billion mark for the first time and increasing full-year spending to $191.7 billion, about $50 billion higher than in 2020.

According to analyst Canalys, the big three dominated cloud infrastructure spending, accounting for 61 percent of the $53.5 billion in Q4 2021.

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Amazon Web Services took 33% of the market, followed by Microsoft Azure (22%), and Google Cloud (9%). Other cloud providers accounted for 36% of the total.

Google Cloud revenues climbed at the quickest rate of 63 percent year over year, followed by Azure at 46 percent, and AWS at 40 percent, even though it is still a loss-making division of Alphabet. Year-over-year growth in cloud infrastructure investment has slowed from above 50% in 2018 to roughly 34% this quarter, indicating the industry’s maturity.

Following Amazon’s Q4 2021 earnings report on Thursday, Canalys provided an update on cloud infrastructure investment. While Amazon missed analyst expectations, its massive AWS subsidiary’s revenues increased by 40% year over year to $17.78 billion, giving it a revenue run rate of $71 billion.

Alphabet announced this week that revenue from Google Cloud in Q4 2021 increased 45 percent year over year, but the company is still attempting to reduce its quarterly operating losses, which have previously topped $1 billion. The deficit was $890 million this quarter, down from a massive $1.24 billion loss in Q4 2020.

Microsoft claimed this month that “the number of larger, long-term Azure contracts” fueled its cloud growth of 46% in fiscal Q2 2022.

The so-called metaverse, as well as related augmented and virtual reality technologies, are expected to drive cloud services spending and infrastructure deployment over the next decade, according to Canalys.

While the metaverse is still being worked out, Canalys envisions applications in gaming, social media, workplace collaboration, education, real estate, eCommerce, and digital commerce for the emerging virtual world. It’s all good news for cloud providers, whatever it turns out to be.

“Compute will be in high demand in virtual and augmented reality environments, while storage, machine learning, IoT, and data analytics will be critical to enable activities like digital twinning, modeling, and interactivity in the metaverse,” said Blake Murray, a Canalys research analyst.