Theorizing “compute” as the organizing asset of digital capitalism

The outsourcing of digital infrastructure and computing capacity is a defining characteristic of digital capitalism, epitomized by the emergence of cloud computing markets. Cloud computing is dominated by three corporations: Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet/Google, collectively known as “Big Cloud.” Contributing to ongoing debates in organization studies and cognate fields, our objective in this paper is to theorize and illustrate how emergence and extension of cloud computing led to the dominance of Big Cloud. We develop the concept of “compute” – representing the components of distributed computation, such as processors, memory, networks, and storage – as a way to understand the contingent nature, dynamics, and strategies that define the cloud computing market today. We first theorize compute as an organizing asset that enables Big Cloud to not only dominate the cloud computing market but also influence and shape wider digital capitalism; and then, second, we empirically illustrate the conceptual relevance of compute as an organizing asset which explains the rise of Big Cloud and their dominance of cloud computing.