Akash Network: The Supercloud

The cloud services landscape has undergone a remarkable transformation over the past decade with the need for compute becoming a fundamental enabler for economic growth. According to Statista, the public cloud market size has grown from $96B in 2016 to an estimated $497B in 2023, at a CAGR of ~22.8%. By 2027, the market size is projected to exceed $835B with the insatiable demand for compute increasing as the world continues to become more digital and enterprises transform their businesses to scale and lower costs.

Cloud services are broken up into three categories: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS). IaaS is a service where an organization can outsource data center capabilities to an external cloud service provider, PaaS is a virtual environment for software development, and SaaS is a distribution model for web-based applications. From 2023 to 2027, IaaS is planned to grow at the fastest rate of the three from 29% of total public cloud spending today to ~38%, mostly at the expense of SaaS spending.
 

Although cloud compute has become a foundational (and invisible) layer of modern society, the market has centralized around three of the world’s largest companies: Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, who together account for over 65% of total annual cloud spend. This not only raises concerns about data security, accessibility, and control, it also can create monopolistic pricing behavior and selective innovation if these entities decide to collude. 

These players, in addition to NVIDIA, also have the resources and talent to monopolize the Artificial Intelligence market by embedding AI workstreams into their cloud services and controlling a majority share of the GPU supply chain. With AI-related services quickly becoming a larger part of the economy, and as a matter of national security across the globe, it is projected to become a $1T market by 2028 at a CAGR of 36.6%.