Fortune 500 CEOs face a choice in 2025: Migrate to the cloud now and capture its powerful advantages or watch competitors build their leads while you continue with legacy infrastructure. That might sound dramatic, but several converging forces make now the right moment to move to the cloud if you haven’t already done so. In our team’s conversations with over 1,500 AWS customer executives annually, we find leaders who spent years debating cloud strategy now asking: “How fast can we get there?”

Cloud migrations are picking up speed. Analysts estimate the cloud computing market at $675.4 billion in 2024, growing 2.5% from the previous year.¹ The cloud migration market is projected to grow from $232.51 billion in 2024 to $806.41 billion by 2029, with a CAGR of 28.24%.² Analysts project small and medium-sized businesses will to allocate more than half of their technology budgets to cloud services in 2025.¹

Force One: AI Readiness

Traditional data centers generally cannot support AI workloads that require elastic GPU access, petabyte-scale data processing, and global edge deployment. The proven way to fill those needs is through the cloud. The global GPU-as-a-service market size was valued at $3.23 billion in 2023 and is projected to grow from $4.31 billion in 2024 to $49.84 billion by 2032.³ 59% of organizations with AI roadmaps said that increasing IT infrastructure investments was an element of that roadmap. Cloud providers can amortize expensive AI hardware across millions of customers, making enterprise-scale AI economically viable.

Force Two: Board Pressures

Board conversations about AI have shifted from “should we?” to “how quickly can we?” This urgency collides with a harsh reality: AI development requires rapid experimentation through proofs-of-concept before scaling to enterprise deployment. Companies need infrastructure that supports quick experiments, rapid access to GPUs for testing, and the ability to scale successful pilots to production.

This infrastructure gap—the difference between cloud’s instant AI readiness and on-premises’ multi-year buildout—determines who leads and who follows. Cloud adopters can deploy applications in weeks rather than months, while on-premises companies remain trapped in multi-year cycles of capital planning, procurement, and infrastructure buildout.

Force Three: Macro-Environmental Instability

Economic uncertainty and geopolitical instability are exposing the vulnerabilities of on-premises infrastructure. Supply chain disruptions and regulatory complexity increase operational risks for centralized data centers. Sudden geopolitical changes can only be met with the agility of the cloud, which allows you to rapidly change the size, makeup, and geographical distribution of your infrastructure. AWS delivers the highest infrastructure availability of any cloud provider through 117 Availability Zones in 37 geographic regions, giving you the flexibility to quickly scale resources up or down based on demand and helping you respond effectively to disasters of any scale^4,5.

Force Four: Sustainability Requirements

AI’s rapid growth is putting additional pressure on power grids. Data centers accounted for about 1.5 percent of global electricity consumption in 2024, an amount expected to double by 2030 because of AI use.⁶ Goldman Sachs Research forecasts global power demand from data centers will increase 50% by 2027 and 165% by the end of the decade.⁷ AWS infrastructure is up to 4.1 times more energy efficient than on-premises infrastructure and can reduce workloads’ carbon footprint by up to 99%.⁸ Amazon also achieved 100% renewable energy matching across operations in 2023—seven years ahead of schedule.⁹ And AWS is committed to being water positive by 2030, returning more water to communities than it uses in direct operations.¹⁰ It is unlikely that your individual on-premises data center can reduce its environmental impact as effectively as AWS can with our scale of investment.

Force Five: The Talent War

Companies clinging to legacy environments are losing technical talent. IDC predicts that by 2026, more than 90% of organizations worldwide will feel the pain of the IT skills crisis, amounting to some $5.5 trillion in losses caused by product delays, impaired competitiveness, and loss of business ¹¹, while a recent Gartner survey found that only 29% of IT workers have high intent to stay with their current employer¹². Cloud skills offer clear advancement paths: AWS-certified engineers earn 25-30% more than their non-certified counterparts¹³.

Meanwhile the talent pipeline for legacy systems continues to shrink. For example, companies that rely on legacy COBOL systems find that universities stopped teaching COBOL and mainframe technologies years ago, leaving them dependent on an aging workforce (on average between 45 and 55 years old), that will soon be leaving the workforce. Although companies are spending 50% more time training employees on new skills compared to the prior year¹⁴, legacy system training is a career dead-end that ambitious developers avoid. Outdated technology, by repelling top talent, forces companies to rely on expensive contractors or accept longer development cycles—further widening the gap between them and their cloud-native competitors.

Force Six: Opportunity Costs and Cost of Delay

Every day organizations delay migrating to cloud, they miss compounding benefits that accelerate over time. You can reduce your total cost of ownership (TCO) by as much as 40% by migrating your business to AWS, an effect that compounds over time.¹ Most on-premises workloads are overprovisioned—more than 80% according to research by TSO Logic, with just 16% of OS instances sized appropriately for their workloads.¹⁵ Moving to the cloud lets you right-size that infrastructure to avoid the waste of over-capacity. But the largest benefit comes with improved data analytics, access to emerging technologies, and operational efficiencies that also compound continuously. The AWS Enterprise Strategy team has documented how delay allows technical debt to accumulate in our post “Managing in Economic Uncertainty.”¹⁶

Net Effect of the Six Forces

The combination of these forces is a strong case for migrating to the cloud this year if you haven’t already done so. Other forces may apply as well, depending on your industry. For example, financial services organizations benefit from AWS’s new European Sovereign Cloud, a €7.8 billion infrastructure investment that helps assure compliance across a number of jurisdictions.¹⁷ Healthcare organizations leverage AWS engineering excellence to satisfy regulatory requirements, as detailed in our Enterprise Strategy post “Don’t Blame Regulations: How Software Excellence Satisfies Compliance.”¹⁸ Manufacturing companies access edge computing capabilities and supply chain resilience through AWS’s global infrastructure that individual manufacturers cannot replicate.

Building your own AI infrastructure involves prohibitive costs, while cloud offers immediate access to enterprise-scale AI capabilities. The math isn’t even close. That alone suggests that 2025 is the year cloud migration becomes table stakes—and hesitation becomes a liability.

Sources

1. 15 Cloud Migration Statistics and Trends for 2024. August 2024.
2. Top 10 Cloud Migration Risks in 2025. August 2024.
3. Using GPUs for AI & Machine Learning: Pros & Cons of On-Premises vs Cloud. January 2025.
4. https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/
5. https://intervision.com/blog-real-world-examples-of-disaster-recovery-using-aws/. 2024
6. Scientific American. Data Centers Will Use Twice as Much Energy by 2030—Driven by AI. April 2025.
7. Goldman Sachs. AI to drive 165% increase in data center power demand by 2030. February 2025.
8. AWS Sustainability. 2025.
9. Sustainability Magazine. How Has Amazon Hit 100% Renewables Target 7 Years Early? July 2024.
10. How AWS will return more water than it uses by 2030. 2025.
11. https://my.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS52128824. 2024.
12. https://innoloft.com/about/blog/solving-the-2024-software-engineer-shortage-how-to-fill-the-tech-talent-gap/86xjvGpx1W. 2024
13. AWS For Engineers. https://awsforengineers.com/blog/aws-certifications-salary-and-job-market-impact/. 2024
14. https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/topics/talent/overcoming-the-tech-talent-shortage-amid-transformation.html. 2024
15. AWS Cloud Enterprise Strategy Blog. Rightsizing Infrastructure Can Cut Costs 36%. January 2018.
16. AWS Cloud Enterprise Strategy Blog. Managing in Economic Uncertainty: Cost Reductions. January 2023.
17. https://www.aboutamazon.eu/news/aws/aws-plans-to-invest-7-8-billion-into-the-aws-european-sovereign-cloud. 2025
18. AWS Cloud Enterprise Strategy Blog. Stop Blaming Regulations: How Software Excellence Satisfies Compliance. June 2025.