Why 2025 is the Inflection Point for AWS Cloud Migration

Every Fortune 500 CEO faces a choice in 2025: Migrate to AWS now and capture exponential AI advantages or watch competitors build insurmountable leads while you’re trapped in legacy infrastructure. Building your own AI infrastructure involves impossible economics, while AWS offers immediate access to enterprise-scale AI capabilities. The math isn’t even close, and there’s no middle ground anymore.

Data centers have grown dramatically in size in terms of power consumption. Ten years ago a 30 MW facility was considered large. Today a 200 MW facility is normal.¹ Goldman Sachs Research forecasts global power demand from data centers will increase 50% by 2027 and 165% by the end of the decade.²

Every board wants AI. But is your company ready? Without AWS as your cloud foundation, AI can’t scale beyond proof-of-concept projects. And without AI, your productivity can’t keep up with AWS-powered competitors that have already automated their core business processes. Five powerful forces are converging: the AI revolution, economic compound effects, macro-environmental pressures, sustainability imperatives, and talent wars. Together they make one thing clear: Organizations can no longer afford to delay AWS migration. Enterprises without access to AI capabilities offered in the cloud will find themselves technologically sidelined while AWS customers capture market share through AI-driven innovation. 2025 is the year AWS migration becomes table stakes—and hesitation becomes a liability.

The Stakes: The Window is Closing In our conversations with over 1,500 AWS customer executives annually, we see CEOs who spent years debating cloud strategy now asking one question: “How fast can we move to AWS?” The cloud computing market was estimated at $675.4 billion in 2024, growing 2.5% from the previous year.³ 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%.⁴ Small and medium-sized businesses are projected to allocate more than half of their technology budgets to cloud services in 2025.³ Companies that miss this window will find themselves unable to compete on AI capabilities, locked into inflexible cost structures, and dependent on fragile supply chains while AWS customers operate with global resilience.

Force One: The AI Infrastructure Reality Check

Traditional data centers cannot support AI workloads that require elastic GPU access, petabyte-scale data processing, and global edge deployment. Companies are finding that the only 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 2032.⁵ 59% of respondents from organizations with AI roadmaps said increasing IT infrastructure investments was an element of that roadmap. AWS can amortize expensive AI hardware across millions of customers, making enterprise-scale AI economically viable for organizations of any size.

Force Two: The Compound Interest Effect

Every day organizations delay migrating to AWS, they miss compounding benefits that accelerate over time. You can reduce your Total Cost of Ownership by as much as 40% by migrating your business to AWS, an effect that compounds over time.³ 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.⁶ But the real benefit comes when the advantages of improved data analytics, cloud-native skills development, and operational efficiencies compound quarterly. The AWS Enterprise Strategy team has documented how delay allows technical debt to accumulate in our post “Managing in Economic Uncertainty.”⁷

AWS migration is just the foundation. Organizations that re-architect applications for serverless computing, embed AI directly into business processes, and automate operations through AWS DevOps practices unlock exponential returns that simple lift-and-shift migrations cannot deliver.

Force Three: The Macro-Environmental Trap

Economic uncertainty and geopolitical instability are exposing the vulnerabilities of on-premises infrastructure. Supply chain disruptions and regulatory complexity make centralized data centers a business liability. AWS delivers the highest infrastructure availability of any cloud provider through 117 Availability Zones within 37 geographic regions, providing organizations the flexibility to quickly scale resources up or down based on demand, enabling them to respond effectively to disasters of any scale^8,9.

Force Four: The Sustainability Imperative

AI’s explosive growth is creating an environmental crisis that only AWS-scale infrastructure can address responsibly. 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.¹⁰ AWS infrastructure is up to 4.1 times more energy efficient than on-premises and can reduce workloads’ carbon footprint by up to 99%.¹¹ Amazon achieved 100% renewable energy matching across operations in 2023—seven years ahead of schedule.¹² And AWS is committed to being water positive by 2030, returning more water to communities than it uses in direct operations.¹³

Force Five: The Talent War

Companies clinging to legacy environments are hemorrhaging 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 ¹⁴, while a recent Gartner survey found that only 29% of IT workers have high intent to stay with their current employer¹⁵. The reason is economic: AWS-certified engineers earn 25-30% more than their non-certified counterparts¹⁶. Cloud skills offer clear advancement paths that legacy systems cannot provide.

Meanwhile the talent pipeline for legacy systems continues shrinking. Universities stopped teaching COBOL and mainframe technologies years ago, leaving companies dependent on an aging workforce where the average age of a COBOL developer is between 45 and 55, which means they will soon be leaving the workforce. On top of that, there are only an estimated 24,000 COBOL programmers in the US¹⁷. Companies spend 50% more time training employees on new skills compared to the prior year¹⁸, but legacy system training represents a career dead-end that ambitious developers avoid.

This creates a vicious cycle: Outdated technology repels top talent, which forces companies to rely on expensive contractors or accept longer development cycles, further widening the competitive gap with cloud-native competitors.

Industry-Specific Pressures Will Also Accelerate Migration

Different industries face distinct regulatory and operational challenges that AWS solves at scale. 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.¹⁹ Healthcare organizations leverage AWS engineering excellence to satisfy regulatory requirements, as detailed in our Enterprise Strategy post “Stop Blaming Regulations: How Software Excellence Satisfies Compliance.”²⁰ Manufacturing companies access edge computing capabilities and supply chain resilience through AWS’s global infrastructure that individual manufacturers cannot replicate.

Take Action This Week

To assess which of your workloads you should prioritize for migration, consider:

• Economic flexibility: Workloads where AWS’s elastic scaling provides immediate cost benefits through AWS Auto Scaling and AWS Lambda.
• Resilience and compliance: Geographic distribution and regulatory requirements that AWS’s global infrastructure addresses.
• Talent and skills: Your organization’s ability to attract technical talent for an AWS-native environment.

Today is a good day to start your AWS migration—yesterday would have been better. Book a migration readiness workshop with AWS this month to assess your organization’s position across all five forces. Run a TCO assessment with our Cloud Economics team to quantify the compound benefits of immediate action. Identify three workloads to pilot AI use cases on AWS by Q3 2025.

The window is closing rapidly. Organizations that begin their AWS journey now can build sustainable competitive moats. If you wait, you’ll play catch-up with the competitors who didn’t.

Sources

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