Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is the delivery of computing resources—servers, storage, databases, networking, software, and AI services—over the internet on a pay-as-you-go basis, eliminating the need for organizations to own and maintain physical infrastructure.

Cloud computing is a $600+ billion market dominated by three hyperscalers: AWS (Amazon), Azure (Microsoft), and Google Cloud. Together they operate millions of servers across hundreds of data centers globally. The scale is staggering: AWS alone handles trillions of requests per day. Cloud infrastructure has become so fundamental that it's effectively the operating system of the modern economy.

AI has become the primary growth driver for cloud spending. Meta's planned $135 billion in 2026 capital expenditure flows primarily into cloud and GPU infrastructure for AI training and inference. Microsoft's partnership with OpenAI, Google's Gemini deployment, and Amazon's Bedrock platform have made cloud providers the gatekeepers of AI capability. The irony of the open-source AI movement is that even open models require massive cloud infrastructure to train and serve at scale.

The architecture is evolving. Edge computing pushes processing closer to users for latency-sensitive applications. Serverless computing (AWS Lambda, Cloudflare Workers) abstracts away server management entirely. WebAssembly-based runtimes enable portable computation across cloud and edge. For AI agents, cloud computing provides the elastic compute substrate: agents can scale from minimal resources for simple tasks to massive GPU clusters for complex inference, paying only for what they use—a key enabler of the economics that make the Creator Era viable.