Cloud Provider Market Share Trend

As we confront an increasingly volatile geopolitical landscape, Canadians are seeking to protect our national sovereignty. As we assess our vulnerabilities, Canada cannot ignore the reality that most of our digital infrastructure, including cloud infrastructure, is owned and controlled by foreign companies.

The global cloud provider market is dominated by American companies. This is just as true in Canada as it is globally. That puts our digital sovereignty at risk.

The chart below shows that Amazon, Microsoft and Google dominate the global cloud market. It also shows that the neoclouds, clouds that are built specifically for the purposes of running AI workloads, including Canada’s Cohere, are slowly gaining market share.

But it is deeply misguided to simply rush out and spend billions of dollars on infrastructure, if we don’t have a clear strategy for governance and economic value capture over the cloud providers, foreign or domestic.

This week in our series, The Foundations of Digital Sovereignty, the Shield team explores how Canada’s myopic focus on data residency, without considering the additional structures needed to ensure our ability to govern and capture value, has exfiltrated our sovereignty. And we explore the options to get it back.

Check out Chapter 5 here.

Read the report on global cloud market share from Synergy Research Group research here.