Amazon Web Services (AWS) was the leading cloud service provider in the second quarter accounting for 31 per cent of total spend after growing 37 per cent on an annual basis, a new report has showed, as top Cloud vendors aim to cut carbon footprint for a green future.

Microsoft Azure was the second largest cloud service provider with a 22 per cent market share, followed by Google Cloud that grew 66 per cent in the latest quarter and accounted for an 8 per cent market share, according to the report by market research firm Canalys.

The Cloud infrastructure services spending increased 36 per cent to $47 billion in Q2, as workload migration and cloud native application development accelerated.

According to the Canalys data released on Friday, expenditure was over $5 billion higher than the previous quarter and over $12 billion more than Q2 2020.

The top three cloud service providers, which collectively accounted for 61 per cent of the total spend in Q2, have made progress towards reducing their own carbon footprints and have set aggressive targets to further minimise their future impact.

“Regulation from governments, especially those tied to the Paris Agreement, will continue to intensify, while an increasing share of cloud services contracts will have sustainability requirements built in,” said Canalys Chief Analyst Matthew Ball.

“Customers will continuously evaluate their cloud service providers and use multi-cloud strategies to achieve the lowest carbon footprint. However, transparency in measurement of sustainable practices will have to improve,” Bell said in a statement.

Currently, 40 per cent of Amazon’s operations run on renewables and it plans to be 100 per cent sourced by 2030. AWS plans to power its operations with 100 per cent renewables by 2025.

Microsoft has been carbon neutral since 2012 and targets being carbon negative and water positive by 2030. It is also innovating with underwater data centres and hydrogen fuel cells, and plans for its data centres to be 100 per cent powered by renewables by 2025.

As of last year, Google announced it had eliminated all its historic carbon emissions through the purchase of offsets and set a target to run all data centres and campuses on renewable energy by 2030.

“Awareness of the energy use and carbon emissions from digital services delivered from data centres operated by cloud service providers is growing. But the leading providers are also at the forefront of environmental resiliency efforts,” said Canalys Research Analyst Blake Murray.