Q1 2026 Channel Checks & Alternative Data: Cloud is on Fire

Hey everyone,

I am posting my regular channel check & other alternative data report before we start the big tech earnings.

For this report, I covered cloud providers Google, Microsoft, and Amazon in terms of their cloud business, and some insightful signals on Microsoft Copilot, which is a pressure point for Microsoft.

Let’s dive in.

Cloud is on fire

Let’s start with my alt data on the most relevant channel-check interviews from clients, cloud consultants, integrators, and former employees.

When bulk analyzing these interviews, demand is high for Q1 2026 across all three hyperscalers: AWS, Azure, and GCP. Looking at the future demand pipeline for the next 3-6 months, the results are even more impressive: almost 60% of these experts see demand exceeding their expectations, 26% see it meeting expectations, and 15% see it below expectations. Keep in mind that expectations were already high going into this year and quarter, so for 60% of experts seeing higher-than-expected demand, the signal is very strong. The driver of demand, as expected, is AI workloads and the move from test to production environments, especially with Agentic AI starting to roll out.

Looking deeper, let’s look at the individual hyperscaler level and what the data shows. As always, I made the % breakdown of experts who think AWS, Azure, or GCP is accelerating the fastest. Here are the results:

62% think GCP is growing the fastest, 41% think Azure is growing the fastest, and 27% think AWS is growing the fastest (important note: the sum is greater than 100% because some experts mentioned two platforms as growing at a faster pace than the other).

Now, this data doesn’t add much value until we compare it to my historical data from past quarters, as we did in the last reports, to truly understand whether anything shifted significantly in Q1. Here is the data: