Back in ancient history — that is, before the debut of ChatGPT in 2023 — cloud was a sleepy space. Top trends rarely made headlines, and the pace of change had slowed. In 2021 and 2022, cloud had largely settled into the norm. The biggest conversations centered on rising cloud bills and how to rationalize them. Announcements were modest, often focused on data center buildouts rather than innovation. The future of cloud felt less like a frontier and more like a continuation — a vision of executing modernization journeys that had already been long underway.

Not anymore. These days, big cloud AI announcements dominate the business press and move stock markets on a regular basis, with players like Microsoft and NVIDIA playing a role as capital entities with big investments in neoclouds such as CoreWeave and Nebius as well as OpenAI. Oracle has been in the spotlight, with a prediction that its cloud revenue will leap from less than $20 billion in the current fiscal year to $144 billion by 2030 based on an AI-driven contract backlog and to $455 billion following the announcement of the earlier $500 billion Stargate data center project by Oracle, OpenAI, and SoftBank.

Simply put, the top cloud trends are now the top business trends.

As always, Forrester’s cloud team follows not only the money but its implications for enterprise cloud customers. Here are some of my favorites from our report, The Top 10 Trends In Cloud, 2025:

  • Hyperscalers and neoclouds vie for first-party AI services in the enterprise. The big global cloud providers got that way with massive horizontal scaleout of look-alike core network compute and storage to capture market share, using these commodity cloud offerings as loss leaders to get long-running contracts to make money over time. The AI-native cloud has disrupted that model, compelling vast investments in entirely new data centers with new cooling, power, networking, and more to host huge networks of GPUs. That’s driving the big push for agentic supremacy, as hyperscalers leverage data gravity to keep customers from defecting.
  • Multicloud is muscle, not fat. What often began as unplanned and redundant cloud sprawl has now become a purposeful play. Cloud leaders increasingly take a portfolio of approach, with clouds separated by workload — for example, a commodity (x86, ARM) workload from one provider for key infrastructure and an AI-native cloud offering from either a hyperscaler AI service or a neocloud. Add in other concerns around sovereignty, as well as efforts to avoid dependencies on a single cloud provider, and multicloud is now seen as strategic in major enterprises. Cloud providers are adapting with multicloud capabilities, even if they downplay them in marketing efforts.
  • CFOs are in the house. The centrality — if not ubiquity — of cloud infrastructure to the modern enterprise, along with rising cloud prices, has captured the attention of the front office. The FinOps Foundation has created a practitioner environment at leading enterprises in which the CFO’s office is typically central, along with stakeholders from procurement and vendor management. Having succeeded in getting cloud providers to abide by a common cost reporting framework, FinOps practitioners are trying their hand at managing a wider set of enterprise IT costs.

These are just some of the key trends we’re exploring. Forrester clients can see the full report here and reach out to us to discuss them at inquiry@forrester.com.