I hate to say, “I told you so,” but the significant downturn in cloud spending that many people anticipated has not yet happened. Last year and this year, I’ve had one argument after another with tech reporters who all believed that cloud spending would take a nosedive after years of rapid growth. Their reasons included an expected recession and economic slowdown, which made their predictions easy to frame.
Making the opposite call was easy for me as well, but for different reasons. Consider the rise of cloud usage to support AI-based systems and complex application deployment over the past few years. That stuff needs to run somewhere, and the cloud is the best bet. Therefore, I predicted no downturn in cloud spending anytime soon.
The numbers
According to IDC, spending on compute and storage infrastructure products for cloud deployments went up almost 8% year on year for the second quarter of 2023 …