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Amazon Web Services (AWS) accounts for one third of the cloud infrastructure market, more than the value generated by its next three biggest rivals combined.

AWS dominates, with a 33.8 percent global market share, while its three nearest competitors -- Microsoft, Google, and IBM -- together accounted for 30.8 percent of the market, according to calculations by analyst Canalys.

The four leading service providers were followed by Alibaba and Oracle, which made up 2.4 percent and 1.7 percent of the total respectively, with rest of the market made up of a number of smaller players.

Source: Canalys

According to the researchers, total spending on cloud infrastructure services, which stood at $10.3bn in the fourth quarter of last year (up 49 percent year-on-year) will hit $55.8bn in 2017 -- up 46 percent on 2016's total of $38.1bn.

Continuing demand is leading the cloud companies to accelerate their data centre expansion. Canalys said AWS launched 11 new availability zones globally in 2016, four of which were established in Canada and the UK in the past quarter. IBM also opened its new data centre in the UK, bringing its total cloud data centres to 50 worldwide, while Microsoft also added with new facilities in the UK and Germany.

Google and Oracle set up their first infrastructure in Japan and China respectively, aiming at expanding their footprint in the Asia Pacific region, while Alibaba also unveiled the availability of its four new data centres in Australia, Japan, Germany, and the United Arab Emirates.

Strict data sovereignty laws -- under which personal data has to be stored in servers that are physically located within the country -- mean cloud service providers have to build data centres in key markets, such as Germany, Canada, Japan, the UK, China, and the Middle East, said Canalys research analyst Daniel Liu.

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