AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud control roughly 70 percent of the global cloud market, yet most conversations about cloud computing still treat it as a fragmented, competitive space. This episode maps how three companies systematically captured the infrastructure layer through a combination of lock-in, service breadth, and first-mover advantage—and why the consolidation happened so quietly that regulators barely noticed. We walk through the actual mechanics: how managed services make switching costs prohibitive, why enterprises stopped building multi-cloud strategies, and what the concentration means for pricing power and innovation velocity. The second-order consequence most people miss is that cloud economics have fundamentally changed. When infrastructure is consolidated, the unit economics of software startups shift in ways that favor certain architectures and business models over others. This isn't a story about monopoly as much as it's about how market structure shapes what gets built.

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