Following our recent look at Alibaba’s bold AI cloud ambitions, attention has now shifted to the West.
In just the past week, Google Cloud and Oracle have unveiled eye-catching forecasts and results that highlight how AI infrastructure is transforming from a technical necessity into a financial juggernaut. Together, these developments underline a global story: the cloud is no longer simply a utility, but the engine room of the AI economy.
Artificial Intelligence has quickly become the most powerful monetization engine for cloud providers, and two companies—Google (Alphabet) and Oracle—are showing just how lucrative this shift has become. Their latest earnings and forecasts highlight not only the scale of the opportunity but also the long-term bets being placed on AI infrastructure as the foundation of digital business.
Google Cloud, once a distant third behind Amazon and Microsoft, has suddenly emerged as one of the fastest-growing arms of Alphabet. Earlier this week, Google executives revealed that the company now expects at least $58 billion in additional revenue over the next two years from its AI-powered cloud services.
Much of this comes from a swelling sales backlog of $106 billion, over half of which is due to be recognized in the near term. High-profile clients such as Anthropic and OpenAI are choosing Google Cloud as a preferred platform for training and running their AI models, giving the business not just revenue but also credibility in an industry where trust and scale matter. Importantly, cloud remains a relatively small slice of Alphabet’s overall revenue—around 14%—which means its rapid expansion is becoming a key hedge against regulatory pressures on the company’s ad-based business model.
Oracle, meanwhile, is experiencing a renaissance few could have predicted a few years ago. The company has forecast a staggering $144 billion in AI-driven cloud revenue over the next four years, sending its stock soaring. Central to this growth is Oracle’s strategy of multi-cloud collaboration—working with Amazon, Microsoft, and even Google to deliver AI compute and database services across platforms. This approach has already resulted in a more than 1,500% surge in multi-cloud revenue. Oracle’s booked business, measured through remaining performance obligations, has exploded to $455 billion and is expected to top $500 billion shortly. High-profile partnerships with the likes of OpenAI, xAI, Meta, Nvidia, and AMD underscore just how integral Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has become to the broader AI ecosystem.
The question is whether this AI cloud boom can last.
On the one hand, the fundamentals are strong: both companies have locked in long-term revenue through massive backlogs and pre-sold capacity. Demand for AI workloads continues to rise as enterprises race to modernize their operations and build AI-first applications. On the other hand, the challenges are real. Building and running vast AI data centres is capital-intensive—Google alone is spending tens of billions annually on infrastructure—and execution complexity only grows as multi-cloud integration spreads. Add in fierce competition from AWS and Microsoft Azure, plus the potential for IT budgets to tighten in tougher economic conditions, and the path forward isn’t guaranteed.
For businesses, the benefits of this cloud fuelled AI arms race are clear. More compute capacity is becoming available, giving enterprises faster and cheaper access to the horsepower needed to train and deploy advanced models. The rise of multi-cloud strategies reduces vendor lock-in and drives down costs, while accelerating innovation cycles by ensuring capacity is on hand when new models are released. For consumers, the gains are less visible but equally impactful: smarter digital services, more reliable infrastructure, and downstream applications in industries like healthcare, finance, and manufacturing that improve everyday life.
The story of Google and Oracle’s AI monetisation isn’t just about two companies boosting their bottom lines—it’s about the reshaping of the digital economy around AI. The cloud is no longer just a place to store data or run basic applications. It has become the factory floor of artificial intelligence, and right now, the machines are running hot. Whether this golden era of AI cloud growth proves sustainable will depend on execution, competition, and economic cycles. But for now, Google and Oracle are proving that in the race to power the future of AI, the cloud is where the money is.
Image by Denys Vitali from Pixabay
Comments are closed.