Amazon, Microsoft emerge as cloud computing winners, Alphabet falters despite record cloud growth

The three titans of cloud computing all posted impressive growth numbers in Q2 2026. But only two of them got a standing ovation from Wall Street. Amazon Web Services pulled in $42.23 billion in quarterly revenue, a 37% jump year-over-year, while Microsoft Azure grew even faster at 43%. Google Cloud, technically the fastest grower of the bunch at roughly 82%, saw its parent company’s stock drop more than 7% on July 24. The market, it turns out, cares about more than just top-line growth. The tale of the tape AWS continues to sit comfortably atop the cloud hierarchy with an estimated 28-31% market share. Its operating margin hit 36.8% in Q2, a historic high for the platform. That combination of scale and profitability is the reason Amazon added more than $400 billion to its market cap in the wake of these results. Microsoft Azure, commanding roughly 23-25% of the market, crossed a milestone of its own. The unit now exceeds $100 billion in trailing twelve-month revenue. Investors responded by piling on more than $600 billion in market capitalization within a week of the earnings release. Google Cloud delivered revenue surging to an estimated $24.8 to $25 billion, blowing past analyst...