# [TECH] Cloud Computing & Big Data
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**Cloud Computing** provides on-demand access to computing resources (servers, storage, AI) via the internet, transforming IT from capital expenditure to utility service.
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## Overview
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Amazon Web Services (2006) launched the modern cloud market; Microsoft Azure (2010) and Google Cloud (2011) followed. Cloud computing enables startups to build global services with zero upfront infrastructure cost. Big Data platforms (Hadoop 2006, Spark 2009) allow analysis of datasets too large for single machines. By 2023, >60% of enterprise IT workloads run in the cloud. The cloud is now the primary substrate for AI training — GPT-4 required ~10²³ FLOP of compute, possible only in large-scale data centres.
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## Key Actors
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- **Companies**: Amazon (AWS, 2006), Microsoft (Azure, 2010), Google (GCP, 2011), Alibaba Cloud (2009), Salesforce, Snowflake
- **Inventors**: Andy Jassy (AWS architect), Werner Vogels (Amazon CTO)
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## Key Patents
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Wide patent portfolio; Amazon's elastic compute cloud (US Patent 7,865,614, 2011) is foundational.
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## Economic Value
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Global cloud computing market: **$600 billion/year** (2023, Gartner). Projected to reach $2T by 2030. Value created by cloud-enabled businesses (Netflix, Airbnb, Uber, etc.): $10T+ in market capitalisation.
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## Notes
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Gartner *Cloud End-User Spending Forecast* 2023. The cloud market is growing at ~22%/year CAGR.
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# Parents
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* [TECH] Personal Computer⏎