Meet the 2 Newcomers Challenging the Cloud Computing Titans in Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud are experiencing impressive growth considering their size, and they're highly profitable, too.

Nebius and CoreWeave are expanding at triple-digit percentage rates, and are still operating in the red.

Investing in cloud computing companies is one of the primary ways people can gain portfolio exposure to the artificial intelligence (AI) megatrend. Most companies don't have the resources and expertise necessary to build their own AI-centric data centers, so instead, they rent processing power out from cloud computing operations like Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) Web Services (AWS), Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) Azure, and Alphabet 's (NASDAQ: GOOG) (NASDAQ: GOOGL) Google Cloud. Those are the three largest titans in the industry, but they aren't the only options.

Two relative newcomers, CoreWeave (NASDAQ: CRWV) and Nebius (NASDAQ: NBIS) , are also viable options for businesses in need of AI cloud capacity, and are growing much faster, in part due to their smaller sizes. So, which cohort would make for a better investment now?

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AWS is the largest cloud infrastructure operation in the world, and actually provides most of Amazon's profits. AWS accounted for 59% of Amazon's operating income in Q1, and its revenue grew at a 28% rate -- its fastest expansion in nearly four years.

Microsoft doesn't divulge as much information about Azure as AWS and Google Cloud do. It only provides the business unit's growth rate, which was still an impressive 40% in its latest quarter.

However, Google Cloud tops both of them, with an impressive 63% growth rate, but it had some help from its Tensor Processing Units (TPUs).