My point was that this sounded familiar.. AI parallel. To your point, yes it was indeed happening. AWS went from growing 40% YoY to 20% and then 16 and it's lowest ever at 12% in the span of a year in 2023. Same thing in that timeframe with Azure from 50% to 30% and MSFT's CFO even warned on the earnings call that further slowdown is coming and remember the stock tanking on that. GCP went from 45% to 32% also, slowest ever since they started reporting that segment.
What happened according to Jassy's words was that FinOps became a thing and since people were spending too much on cloud, they started optimizing within cloud very aggressively. Sell-side notes, and I recall Barclays or Goldman reporting that over 80% CIOs planned on moving workloads off cloud to see how it goes while IDC found ~80% expecting to repatriate some compute or storage within a year.
Then, magic happened. AI came in, total market grew, server lives expanded increasing margins by couple hundred basis points. None of the points identified in the article are wrong. This paradox they mention simply moved a layer up. Why pay NVDA or frontier labs money, when AWS/GCP/Azure give you access to the orchestration layer? That's going to be the thinking going forward imo.