Alphabet Is Outgrowing Amazon and Microsoft Where It Matters Most — Why This Makes Alphabet Stock a Buy | The Motley Fool

For investors trying to figure out which of the big cloud platforms is winning the AI (artificial intelligence) build-out, the most recent batch of earnings reports just delivered an answer that may surprise some.

Alphabet‘s (GOOGL +0.20%) (GOOG +0.27%) latest quarterly results revealed that Google Cloud revenue surged 63% year over year to $20.0 billion. Showing what an incredible feat this is, that growth rate sat well above the 40% Microsoft (MSFT +1.62%) reported for Azure during the same period — and it’s more than twice the 28% growth Amazon (AMZN +1.25%) posted for its own cloud computing business, AWS.

Even more, this was Google Cloud’s third straight quarter of accelerating growth. And looking ahead, a cloud backlog that nearly doubled in just three months suggests this lead could keep widening.

Outpacing the leaders

In terms of sheer size, Google Cloud’s $20 billion still trails AWS’s $37.6 billion and Microsoft’s broader intelligent cloud…