The Next Decade's Winners: 3 Cloud Stocks That Could Deliver Monster Returns

Key Points

• Amazon is the market leader in cloud computing, and the business is still growing nicely.

• Microsoft's big edge is its preferred access to OpenAI's popular AI models.

• Alphabet's vertical integration could become a big advantage in the cloud computing market down the road.

• 10 stocks we like better than Amazon ›

Some of the best growth stocks in the market can be found in the cloud computing space. In simplest terms, cloud computing is the delivery of computing services over the internet. Customers get access to pooled resources like processing power and storage, and can quickly scale their usage up and down as needed. This makes it attractive to companies that want to avoid the cost and hassle of owning and maintaining their own servers.

Cloud computing is a high fixed-cost business that gets more profitable as it scales. As customer usage grows and spreads the cost of the massive infrastructure investments, operating leverage begins to kick in. The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has only accelerated cloud demand, with businesses rushing to customize models, train their own, and run AI workloads in the cloud.

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Let's look at three cloud leaders that are well-positioned to benefit from this powerful megatrend over the next decade.

1. Amazon

Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) created the modern cloud market with Amazon Web Services, which remains the clear leader with roughly 30% share. While Amazon is better known for its e-commerce business, AWS is its profit engine and fastest-growing segment. Last quarter, AWS revenue grew 17.5% to $30.9 billion, while operating income climbed to $10.2 billion.

Amazon is going all in on AI, which should drive the next leg of AWS growth. Its Bedrock service provides access to top foundation models that customers can customize, while SageMaker gives them tools to build and train their own models. Amazon has also developed custom chips for training and inference through its Annapurna Labs subsidiary, giving AWS a cost and efficiency advantage over solutions that only use graphics processing units (GPUs).

The company also isn't sitting still, looking to capture the opportunity in agentic AI. It recently rolled out Strands, an open-source framework for building AI agents, and Agentcore, a secure environment to deploy them at scale.

AWS remains a top cloud computing company, and its massive infrastructure build-out gives it the ability to capture more demand as AI adoption continues to rise.

2. Microsoft

While it's the No. 2 player in the space, Microsoft's (NASDAQ: MSFT) Azure has been steadily gaining share. Azure revenue surged 39% last quarter, marking the eighth straight quarter of 30%-plus growth. That's huge growth, but it could have been even higher as the company remains capacity-constrained and is investing heavily to try and keep up with demand. This spending will be focused on adding more GPUs and servers directly tied to AI workloads to support revenue growth.

Microsoft's secret sauce is its partnership with OpenAI, which gives it preferred access to its GPT large language models (LLMs). It also started hosting models from Elon Musk's xAI and brought in DeepMind's co-founder to build its own in-house AI models to add some diversity.

That said, its ability to directly provide access to OpenAI's leading AI models is the main driver of Azure's growth. On that front, Microsoft and OpenAI recently came to an agreement to change their relationship to let OpenAI restructure into a for-profit company. This agreement should ease some tensions that were building between the companies and continue to give Microsoft preferred access to OpenAI's technology.

Azure is now the centerpiece of Microsoft's future, and given its level of growth, it could surpass AWS at some point in the next decade.

3. Alphabet

While Alphabet's (NASDAQ: GOOGL) (NASDAQ: GOOG) Google Cloud is the third-largest cloud provider with about 13% market share, its business is perhaps the most intriguing. Last quarter, Google Cloud revenue jumped 32% to $13.6 billion and operating income more than doubled to $2.8 billion. Demand is so strong that Alphabet recently raised its 2025 capital expenditure (capex) budget by $10 billion to $85 billion to expand data center capacity.

Google Cloud's edge is its technology stack. Its Gemini AI models are among the best and are quickly catching up to those from OpenAI. Meanwhile, its custom AI chips called Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) are highly regarded, and can give it and customers a cost-per-inference advantage as AI workloads shift from training to running models at scale.

It also developed Kubernetes, which has become the industry standard for containerized apps, and its Vertex AI platform lets customers easily build, deploy, and manage models. The company is also a leader in data analytics with BigQuery, and its pending acquisition of Wiz will bring a top cloud security offering. If that wasn't enough, it also owns one of the largest private fiber networks in the world, which allows it to deliver high performance and low latency globally.

While the AI wave is currently lifting all cloud providers, Google Cloud's vertical integration sets it apart and positions it well for the future.

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Geoffrey Seiler has positions in Alphabet. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft. The Motley Fool recommends the following options: long January 2026 $395 calls on Microsoft and short January 2026 $405 calls on Microsoft. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.