In this brave new world of running businesses with cloud and SaaS technology, who’s buying hardware anymore? Well, cloud providers, that’s who. Financial filings from AWS, Microsoft and Google show they spent a combined $31.54 billion on capital expenditures and capital leases in 2016. Amazon is building a new cloud region in Sweden, and analysts say one region alone can cost several hundred million dollars. This kind of spending clearly reflects the way businesses are adopting cloud, and also makes it a lot harder for other wannabe providers to get in the game.