News

The State of AI in the Cloud 2025: Growth Surges Amid Security Concerns

• By John K. Waters
• 02/26/2025

Artificial intelligence (AI) adoption in cloud environments has reached new heights, with 85% of organizations now leveraging some form of AI, according to the latest State of AI in the Cloud 2025 report. While AI's role in innovation and disruption continues to expand, security vulnerabilities and governance challenges remain pressing concerns.

One of the most striking findings of the report is the meteoric rise of DeepSeek. The DeepSeek-R1 model has gained significant traction, accumulating 130,000 downloads on the AI platform Hugging Face.

Currently, 7% of organizations using self-hosted AI models are running DeepSeek—a twofold increase within January 2025 alone. However, this surge has been accompanied by security concerns, particularly after researchers uncovered an exposed DeepSeek database leaking sensitive data. The findings reinforce the need for stringent AI security and oversight.

Despite growing competition, OpenAI continues to dominate the AI landscape. The report notes that 75% of organizations now use self-hosted AI models, while 77% utilize dedicated AI/ML software. OpenAI and Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI SDKs remain the most widely used, running in 67% of cloud environments.

This widespread adoption underscores OpenAI’s stronghold in enterprise AI solutions, the report's authors claim, even as new players challenge its position.

The AI ecosystem remains a blend of open-source and closed-source solutions. The report found that 8 of the top 10 hosted AI technologies are associated with open-source models. This trend suggests that enterprises are increasingly integrating both public and proprietary AI tools to build flexible, scalable solutions.

Self-hosted AI models are seeing rapid adoption, with BERT’s usage skyrocketing from 49% to 74% year-over-year. Meanwhile, new entrants such as Mistral AI and Alibaba Cloud’s Qwen2 have gained traction, signaling increased diversity in the AI marketplace.

Although AI continues to unlock new opportunities for creativity and efficiency, its rapid deployment poses challenges around security, governance, and cost management. The report warns that many AI tools are being integrated without clear industry standards, raising concerns over risk visibility and responsible AI usage.

Security teams and developers must collaborate to mitigate risks, including data exposure and unauthorized AI usage within cloud environments, the report concluded.

As AI technology continues to evolve, industry leaders face the dual challenge of driving innovation while ensuring robust security and compliance measures.