AI Cloud Providers Comparison
Compare major cloud providers for AI workloads - GPU instances, AI services, pricing, and global infrastructure.
Last updated: 2026-02-11
| Feature |  AWSAmazon |  Microsoft AzureMicrosoft |  Google CloudGoogle |  Oracle Cloud (OCI)Oracle |  IBM CloudIBM |  Alibaba CloudAlibaba Group |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| General | ||||||
| Parent Company | Amazon | Microsoft | Alphabet / Google | Oracle Corporation | IBM | Alibaba Group |
| Cloud Market Share (IaaS)(?) | ~31% | ~25% | ~11% | ~2% | ~1% | ~4% |
| Annual Cloud Revenue | ~$105B+ (2024) | ~$96B+ (Intelligent Cloud, FY2024) | ~$43B+ (2024) | ~$20B+ (FY2025) | ~$6B+ (Cloud, 2024) | ~$15B+ (Cloud, FY2025) |
| Global Regions | 34 regions, 108 AZs | 60+ regions | 40 regions, 121 zones | 49 regions | 16 regions | 30+ regions |
| AI/ML Platform | ||||||
| Managed ML Platform | SageMaker | Azure Machine Learning | Vertex AI | OCI Data Science | watsonx.ai | PAI (Platform for AI) |
| AutoML | ||||||
| MLOps / Model Registry | ||||||
| Notebooks (Managed) | SageMaker Studio Notebooks | Azure ML Notebooks | Vertex AI Workbench / Colab Enterprise | OCI Data Science Notebooks | watsonx.ai Prompt Lab | PAI-DSW Notebooks |
| Vector Database | OpenSearch, Aurora pgvector, Neptune | Azure AI Search, Cosmos DB | AlloyDB, Vertex AI Vector Search | Oracle 23ai (vector), OpenSearch | watsonx.data (Milvus), PostgreSQL | AnalyticDB, DashVector |
| GPU & AI Accelerators | ||||||
| Nvidia H100 | ||||||
| Nvidia H200 | ||||||
| Nvidia B200 (Blackwell) | Coming 2025-2026 | Coming 2025-2026 | Coming 2025-2026 | Coming 2026 | ||
| Nvidia A100 | ||||||
| AMD MI300X | ||||||
| Custom AI Chips | Trainium2, Inferentia2 | Maia 100 (coming) | TPU v5p, TPU v6e (Trillium) | Hanguang 800 (inference) | ||
| Max GPUs per Instance | 8x H100 (p5.48xlarge) | 8x H100 (ND H100 v5) | 8x H100 (a3-highgpu-8g) | 8x H100 (BM.GPU.H100.8) | N/A | 8x A100 (ecs.gn7e) |
| GPU Cluster / SuperPod(?) | UltraClusters (up to 20,000+ GPUs) | ND H100 v5 clusters (InfiniBand) | A3 Mega (up to 26,000 H100s) | SuperClusters (up to 65,536 GPUs) | HPC / EFLOPS clusters | |
| GenAI / LLM Services | ||||||
| GenAI Service Name | Amazon Bedrock | Azure OpenAI Service | Vertex AI (Model Garden) | OCI Generative AI | watsonx.ai | Model Studio (Bailian) |
| OpenAI Models (GPT-4o) | ||||||
| Claude (Anthropic) | ||||||
| Llama (Meta) | ||||||
| Gemini (Google) | ||||||
| Mistral | ||||||
| Model Fine-tuning | ||||||
| RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Gen.)(?) | Bedrock Knowledge Bases | Azure AI Search + OpenAI | Vertex AI Search / Grounding | OCI Generative AI Agents | watsonx.ai RAG | PAI-RAG |
| AI Agents / Orchestration | Bedrock Agents | Azure AI Agent Service | Vertex AI Agent Builder | OCI AI Agents | watsonx Orchestrate | Alibaba Cloud AI Agents |
| AI Infrastructure | ||||||
| InfiniBand Networking(?) | ||||||
| High-Performance Storage | FSx for Lustre, S3 | Azure Managed Lustre, Blob Storage | Parallelstore, Cloud Storage FUSE | File Storage, Object Storage | Cloud Object Storage | NAS, OSS |
| Kubernetes (Managed) | EKS | AKS | GKE | OKE | IKS / Red Hat OpenShift | ACK |
| Serverless Inference | SageMaker Serverless Inference | Azure ML Serverless Endpoints | Vertex AI Endpoints (autoscaling) | OCI Data Science Model Deployment | watsonx.ai API | PAI-EAS |
| Pricing (H100 GPU Instances) | ||||||
| On-Demand (8x H100, per hr)(?) | ~$98/hr (p5.48xlarge) | ~$100/hr (ND H100 v5) | ~$98/hr (a3-highgpu-8g) | ~$78/hr (BM.GPU.H100.8) | N/A | N/A (A100 available) |
| Reserved / Committed (1yr) | ~40-60% discount | ~40-60% discount | ~40-55% discount (CUDs) | ~50-65% discount | N/A | ~30-50% discount |
| Spot / Preemptible | Spot Instances (~60-90% off) | Spot VMs (~60-80% off) | Spot VMs (~60-91% off) | Preemptible (~50% off) | Preemptible (~50-90% off) | |
| Free Tier (AI/ML) | SageMaker free tier (250 hrs/mo for 2 months) | $200 credit + free tier services | $300 credit + free tier | Always Free tier + $300 credit | Lite plan (limited free usage) | Free trial credits available |
| Enterprise & Security | ||||||
| SOC 2 Type II | ||||||
| HIPAA Compliant | Limited | |||||
| FedRAMP Authorized | High (GovCloud) | High (Azure Government) | High | High (OCI Gov) | Moderate | |
| Private Networking / VPC | ||||||
| SLA (Compute) | 99.99% | 99.99% | 99.99% | 99.99% | 99.99% | 99.95% |
| Key Differentiators | ||||||
| AI Strength | Broadest AI service portfolio; custom Trainium chips; Bedrock multi-model | Exclusive OpenAI partnership; deepest enterprise AI integration | Best-in-class TPUs; native Gemini; strongest ML research heritage | Best price-performance for GPU clusters; largest SuperClusters | Enterprise AI governance (watsonx); hybrid cloud with Red Hat | Leading cloud in Asia; strong Qwen model ecosystem |
| Best For | Broadest ecosystem, startups to enterprise, multi-model flexibility | Enterprise orgs using Microsoft stack, OpenAI-first development | ML researchers, data-intensive workloads, Google ecosystem | Cost-optimized GPU training at scale, Oracle DB workloads | Regulated industries, hybrid cloud, AI governance | Asia-Pacific market, Chinese language AI, e-commerce AI |