Cloud Computing Statistics (2026): Spending, Waste, Market Share & What Nonprofits Should Know

Cloud computing has become the default way organizations buy software, storage and computing power, and 2026 brings record spending alongside rising cost pressure. This report gathers the figures we could verify from named research bodies and industry surveys, separates forecasts from measured results, and explains what the numbers mean for volunteer-driven nonprofits and churches. It is part of our statistics hub, where you can compare cloud data with other sector benchmarks.

Key takeaways

How big is the cloud market in 2026?

Gartner's most widely cited series tracks public cloud end-user spending, which covers software delivered as a service as well as infrastructure and platforms. Gartner's most recent public cloud forecast puts worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services at $723.4 billion in 2025, up 21.5% from $595.7 billion in 2024 , according to a compiled summary of Gartner data. Growth is expected to continue. IDC, a separate research firm, forecasts public cloud services spending above $1 trillion in 2026 . Because the firms define the market differently, the totals should not be mixed.

Regional forecasts show where growth is concentrated. Gartner projects that end-user public cloud services spending in Europe will grow 24% in 2026 , and in India, end-user spending on public cloud services is forecast to grow 28.1% to total $17.5 billion in 2026, up from $13.7 billion in 2025 .

Who controls the cloud: provider concentration

Market share depends on the tracker. Synergy Research Group measures cloud infrastructure revenue, and its latest quarter reported in our research shows that enterprise spending on cloud infrastructure services in Q3 jumped 55 percent year-over-year, the 12th consecutive quarter of growth . The same release says as of Q3 2026, AI-specific cloud services represent a third of the total market. Among providers, Amazon takes the lead in the market, at 26 percent market share. The providers with the next two highest market shares are Microsoft (19 percent) and Google (16 percent).

An earlier Synergy reading for Q2 2026 gave slightly different numbers, with AWS leading worldwide cloud infrastructure services with 28% share, followed by Microsoft at 20% and Google at 15% . Treat provider shares as directional, since each quarterly release revises the picture.

Cloud waste and cost control

Cost has overtaken growth as the central cloud issue. In Flexera's 2026 survey of 753 cloud decision-makers, estimated wasted cloud spend on IaaS and PaaS is 29%, reversing a five-year downward trend and reflecting added cost complexity from AI and new PaaS/SaaS offerings. The prior year's estimate was lower, and the survey's self-estimated waste figure climbed to 29 percent of cloud spend, up from 27 percent last year . Overspending is common too. Seventeen percent of organizations blew through their public cloud budget in the past year. Flexera also found that 84% of organizations identify managing cloud spend as their top challenge , although another summary of the same survey reports 85%, so the exact figure varies by write-up.

Governance, FinOps and hybrid architecture

Organizations are responding by formalizing oversight. Flexera reports that 71% of organizations have a CCOE or similar, and 63% rely on a FinOps team to advise on, manage or execute cloud cost optimization strategies. Measurement is also changing: nearly half of organizations (49%, up from 40% last year) are now using unit economics to understand their cost per service. Hybrid is now standard, with 73% of organisations operating hybrid estates, a 3-percentage-point increase year over year.

The AI effect on cloud demand

Generative AI is the biggest new driver of cloud use. In Flexera's data, GenAI has jumped 8 percentage points to the third-place spot (58%) among public cloud services used by all organisations, and nearly half say they use it extensively. Analysts expect AI infrastructure to keep spending rising. Gartner's India forecast notes that strong enterprise demand for AI-ready cloud infrastructure is redefining cloud investment priorities , and its PaaS segment is forecast to be the largest category for Indian organizations in 2026, reaching $6.4 billion . Growth at this pace also adds to cost risk, since AI workloads are harder to forecast than standard hosting.

The AI share of the market is large. Synergy reports that as of Q3 2026, AI-specific cloud services represent a third of the total market.

Nonprofit cloud adoption: what the sector data shows

Nonprofit-specific data is thinner and older than the enterprise numbers. A long-running TechSoup Global survey of more than 10,500 charities in 88 countries found that ninety percent of charities reported using at least one online application. The most common services were e-mail (55 percent), social networks (47 percent), file storage and sharing (26 percent), Web conferencing (24 percent), and office productivity (23 percent). Knowledge gaps were the main barrier: 60 percent of survey participants said "lack of knowledge" was a major barrier to the adoption of cloud computing .

Newer, smaller studies point the same way. A digital transformation survey reported that 94% of U.S. respondents say cloud solutions will have a positive impact on their nonprofit organization , though its publication date is older than this report's data. On the other hand, Salesforce's nonprofit product has been slower to spread: only 25% have gone live with one or more implementations of the Nonprofit Cloud , according to a consultant survey.

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