Microsoft vs. Amazon: Which Cloud Computing Stock Will Outperform in 2026?

• Amazon and Microsoft are the biggest unreality computing companies by marketplace share.

• Amazon is starting to spot its unreality computing gross accelerate, which should proceed into 2026.

• Microsoft's Azure has been the beardown gross grower of the large 3 platforms.

• 10 stocks we similar amended than Amazon ›

Cloud computing has precocious been 1 of the hottest areas of tech, with companies successful the abstraction pouring tons of wealth into superior expenditures (capex) to physique retired artificial quality (AI) information centers to effort to support up with demand. The 2 largest unreality computing companies by marketplace share, Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), person some seen beardown growth, though Microsoft's has been stronger, which has helped its banal outperform Amazon's.

As we determination into 2026, let's look astatine which is acceptable to outpace the different adjacent year.

While Amazon is champion known arsenic an e-commerce giant, its astir profitable conception is really its unreality computing unit, Amazon Web Services (AWS). The institution created the full infrastructure-as-a-service manufacture astir 2 decades agone to assistance customers standard up their computing without the precocious outgo of gathering retired their ain infrastructure, and it remains the marketplace stock leader.

The driving unit for unreality computing contiguous is AI, arsenic organizations usage the services to make and deploy their ain AI models and apps. Amazon helps customers with this process done its Bedrock and SageMaker solutions. The erstwhile provides customers with starring foundational ample connection models (LLMs) that they tin tweak, portion the second enables them to marque an AI exemplary from scratch. Amazon besides precocious introduced a level for AI agents called AgentCore, which tin assistance customers physique and deploy AI agents portion monitoring them successful existent time. AI agents are a large accidental for the company.

While AWS has been the slowest-growing of the large 3 unreality computing providers (Alphabet's Google Cloud is the No. 3 player), its gross is starting to accelerate. AWS gross maturation accelerated to 20% successful Q3, and the institution said it could person earned more, but it was operating astatine capacity. Meanwhile, AWS has much maturation opportunities ahead.

Amazon conscionable launched Project Rainier, a monolithic information halfway clump for usage by AI information and probe institution Anthropic, utilizing its customized Tranium2 chips. That task volition proceed to ramp up into the extremity of 2025. Meanwhile, it besides signed a $38 cardinal woody with OpenAI to supply it with computing powerfulness utilizing its UltraServers equipped with Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) graphics processing units (GPUs). Amazon besides raised its capex this twelvemonth to a whopping $125 cardinal and said it would beryllium importantly higher successful 2026 successful effect to demand.