Do you remember first hearing about this strange thing called “the cloud”? It was probably sometime in the 2010s. Many said it would be a massive boon for tech companies — and they were right.
Spending on public cloud usage rose from $31 billion in 2015 to nearly $200 billion in 2023. Microsoft‘s Intelligent Cloud and Amazon‘s (NASDAQ: AMZN) Amazon Web Services (AWS) provide terrific revenue streams with annual run rates of over $100 billion each. This technology has been the linchpin driving total returns of over 900% since 2015 for both stocks.
Artificial intelligence (AI) looks like the next big thing. Some say it will be as transformative as the internet. The International Monetary Fund says it will change nearly 40% of jobs worldwide, and data compiled by Statista shows the AI market will increase sixfold from $300 billion this year to over $1.8 trillion by 2030.
