Enterprise computing, as tech for business is called, has for years consumed about three-quarters of the $1 trillion of annual worldwide expenditures on technology. Intel enjoyed being the biggest chip supplier by a wide margin to that diverse market.

But the advent of cloud-driven businesses like Google, Microsoft’s Azure and Amazon Web Services, or A.W.S., which rents cloud capabilities to businesses, is shrinking the number of companies that would buy or even build machines using Intel’s server chips.

“When you sell semiconductors to just a few cloud providers who buy at giant scale, you can be at the mercy of an A.W.S.,” said Lydia Leong, an analyst specializing in cloud computing at the information-technology research firm Gartner. Ms. Leong estimated that by the end of this year, one-fifth of the applications that companies build would be made on cloud systems, a number that she said would rise quickly. “Google is already in the top five server manufacturers — they can have power over Intel.”

In other words, big customers can demand lower prices, and like any company, Intel does not want to rely on a handful of customers, particularly because it does not dominate the market for chips that go into smartphones the way it once did the market for chips that run PCs.

Intel’s server business is well worth protecting. In the last quarter, Intel’s PC chip business shrank 14 percent from a year earlier, to $7.5 billion, while data center chips, Intel’s second-largest segment at $3.9 billion, grew 10 percent in the same period.

Mirantis could be a hedge against that shrinking pool of customers for server chips. Mirantis software is a so-called open-source product; the same kind of software is also produced by Hewlett-Packard, Dell, IBM, Cisco and others. It enables about 50 computer servers to function in concert, creating one flexible machine, but Intel wants Mirantis to eventually raise that to 1,000 servers.

The hope is that this software will make it easier for more companies to develop cloud-computing systems. And among restive start-ups like Mirantis, there is an increasing sense that, now that the serious money is moving around, there are plenty of opportunities to work with giants both inside and outside the tech industry.