Generative AI is completely transforming the way we build, use, and even think about technology. Recent developments have ushered in a new era of innovation, one that McKinsey estimates could be a $4.4 trillion shock to the global economy.
The next great AI product could come from anyone, anywhere and change everyone’s lives. Yet a handful of Big Tech companies in the United States still control much of the world’s cloud computing infrastructure. These hyperscalers embody the Silicon Valley ethos with their ambitious goals and aggressive strategies. They are territorial and competitive and while that can lead to exceptional service for some customers, it can put customers at risk for others.
The cloud supremacy of these companies hinders innovation. By making developers increasingly dependent on their services, they are gaining an unfair share of the market, locking out smaller cloud startups that often offer more flexible, affordable solutions.
If we want to truly unlock the transformative potential of AI, we must promote a more democratic cloud: one where developers have the freedom to choose their vendors and build the ideal cloud infrastructure for their goals. This will promote interoperability, streamline the application development lifecycle, and ultimately lead to better-performing AI products and services.
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The traditional hyperscalers
The Big Three – Microsoft Azure, AWS and Google Cloud – were once the Only Three. Just eight years ago, these providers were virtually the only option for any organization operating in the cloud.
The environment has changed rapidly since then. People say “every company is a technology company” these days, and research shows this to be true. It’s not just the world’s large enterprises and governments that need substantial cloud support, but also startups, mid-market players, and even companies whose primary offering isn’t a technology product at all.
But what makes one organization ‘substantial’ is the overload of the other. What might be a useful feature for an international mega-corporation could be a huge obstacle for a small AI developer. Product overload creates more inefficiencies than benefits, and those inefficiencies will ultimately fall on the customer as applications cannot meet performance demands.
The Big Three are notorious for their overabundance of products; In their attempts to outsmart the competition, they provide their customers with complicated features that most of them will never need. That said, the solution lies not in ousting the Big Three through a coup in the cloud market, but in creating a more equitable cloud ecosystem overall – and that starts with letting companies know they have options .
Hope for the independent market
The rise of AI is accelerating the growth of independent cloud providers. In addition to supporting cloud engineers, developers need comprehensive solutions for their data science teams, whose work in AI training and maintenance requires diverse computing resources. This need has created a groundswell of demand for leaner, cheaper cloud providers.
Independent clouds allow smaller companies to develop, test and deploy according to their unique business needs. But ‘independent’ certainly does not mean that it is a shoddy company or new to the market. These providers run the latest products in data centers in strategic locations around the world, and their solutions help businesses scale and meet demand.
Adoption of multi-cloud and hybrid cloud has also increased, with developers looking for improved flexibility and scalability. By orchestrating operations across multiple clouds, companies can save money while building a computational toolkit that best enables their growth.
This growing independent cohort is also challenging the long-standing American centricity of the cloud market. Deployment at the edge requires localized support, and when developers can build close to home and deploy close to their customers at the same time, they will achieve better software performance while streamlining their development and testing operations. Independent clouds are great for this kind of flexibility, and they’re popping up all over the world.
Democratizing the cloud for AI and more
Democratizing the cloud is crucial for the sustainability of AI development. AI workloads are highly resource-intensive, and at the current pace of innovation, future AI programs will require even more complex solutions to handle the processing load. ChatGPT is far from the final frontier, and as generative AI becomes smarter and more capable, developers will need more custom cloud options. When companies first migrated to the cloud, many became locked into a single vendor, and they don’t plan to repeat this with AI. By improving the accessibility of composable, multi-cloud strategies, we can enable companies of all sizes and scope to scale.
Don’t misunderstand. The Big Three have their place in a democratized cloud marketplace: they provide valuable services and can deliver the massive computing power that the world’s mega-enterprises need. But for the other 90%, we need a thriving independent market to foster the innovation that an AI-powered future will deliver. In the age of AI, every organization in every region around the world should have the power to build, test and deploy ML-driven, cloud-native applications.
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