In short

The cloud market is dominated by a handful of giants. Three of them — nicknamed the hyperscalers — account for most of it: Amazon (AWS), Microsoft (Azure) and Google (Google Cloud). Alongside them, European players are betting on data sovereignty. And one common confusion deserves to be cleared up right away: Meta is not a public cloud provider in the same sense. Let’s sort it out, without the jargon.

Before you read on: if the very notion of the cloud isn’t clear, start with The cloud, what is it exactly?.

What is a ‘hyperscaler’?

A hyperscaler is a provider capable of operating hundreds of thousands of servers spread around the world, and of renting out that power on demand. It offers hundreds of services (compute, storage, databases, AI…) billed by usage. Three names dominate this category by a wide margin.

The three giants (the hyperscalers)

• AWS — Amazon Web Services. The pioneer (2006) and the leader: the broadest and oldest catalog. Flagship services: EC2 (servers), S3 (storage). Often the default choice for startups and large platforms.
• Microsoft Azure. The number two, very strong in the enterprise thanks to its integration with the Microsoft ecosystem (Windows, Microsoft 365, Active Directory). Favored by organizations that are already ‘Microsoft’.
• Google Cloud (GCP). Known for data and AI / machine learning, and for Kubernetes (the container orchestrator, created by Google). Key services: BigQuery (data analytics), AI tools.

None is ‘the best’ in absolute terms: the right choice depends on the existing technical setup, the team’s skills and the needs.

The other global players

Beyond the trio, others carry weight in certain segments: Oracle Cloud (databases, enterprises), IBM Cloud, and Alibaba Cloud, dominant in Asia.

The European providers (sovereignty & GDPR)

For many organizations, where the data is stored matters as much as the price. European players answer this need:

• OVHcloud (France) — the largest European cloud.
• Scaleway (France), Hetzner (Germany), Infomaniak (Switzerland).

Their argument: data hosted in Europe, subject to the GDPR, away from extraterritorial laws like the US Cloud Act (which can compel a US company to hand over data, even when stored outside the United States). This is what’s called the sovereign cloud.

And where does Meta fit in?

Here’s the useful clarification: Meta (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) is not a public cloud provider. The company does operate huge data centers, but to run its own services — you don’t ‘rent’ servers from Meta the way you do from AWS.

Its role as a ‘provider’ lies elsewhere, and it’s a real one: Meta releases open AI models (the Llama family) and created PyTorch, one of the major machine-learning tools. In other words, Meta is a major player in AI, not in hosting for rent.

The same nuance applies to other digital giants: Apple and Netflix are big customers of the cloud (Netflix has historically relied on AWS), not providers to the general public.

Summary table

Provider	Parent company	Known for
AWS	Amazon	Leader, broadest catalog
Azure	Microsoft	Enterprise, Microsoft ecosystem
Google Cloud	Google	Data, AI, Kubernetes
Oracle / IBM	Oracle / IBM	Databases, enterprise
Alibaba Cloud	Alibaba	Leader in Asia
OVHcloud / Scaleway	France	European cloud, sovereignty
Meta	Meta	Open source AI (Llama) — not a public cloud

How to choose (for an SMB or an individual)

• Small showcase site or blog: no need for a hyperscaler. Shared hosting or a VPS, ideally European, is simpler and cheaper.
• An application that needs to scale: a hyperscaler makes sense (elasticity, managed services), at the cost of a complexity and a billing that need close watching.
• Sensitive or regulated data: favor a European provider for data location and the GDPR.

Key criteria to compare: real cost (the ‘by usage’ model can climb), complexity, data location, support quality and dependency risk (vendor lock-in).

Key takeaways

The global cloud rests on three hyperscalers — AWS, Azure, Google Cloud — complemented by specialized players and European providers focused on sovereignty. Meta, despite its size, is not a public cloud: its contribution is open AI. And for most small projects, classic hosting remains the wisest choice: you only reach for a giant when the need truly justifies it.