MORGAN STANLEY: Cloud usage will more than double in the next two years —and that's great news for the stocks of these 8 high-tech companies (MSFT, AMZN, GOOG, GOOGL)

Tech titans like Amazon and Microsoft aren't the only ones that are benefitting from the mass migration of businesses to the cloud.

As cloud computing becomes more ubiquitous in the IT industry, those same cloud giants are ramping up the amount they're spending on servers and data center equipment — and that's great news for those vendors from whom they buy their hardware and software.

Today, public clouds account for just 20% of all computing workloads, but that percentage could grow to 48% by the end of 2020, according to Morgan Stanley.

In a report published on Tuesday, analyst Katy L. Huberty forecast that global capital expenditure spending among 14 major cloud companies will increase 35% in 2018, up from 16% growth in 2017. Morgan Stanley estimates that Google, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft alone will account for 73% of that growth in 2018.

These forecasts are based on spending at the companies which Morgan Stanley identifies as the most likely to invest in cloud infrastructure. It also includes other capital expenditure investments that the company might make, as well.

Those dollars — spent by companies with large cloud businesses like Google, in addition to those who run their own clouds to power their business, like Facebook — will greatly benefit the vendors that sell data centers, servers and networking equipment.

These are the 8 companies Huberty said have the most to gain from the growing cloud industry.

Arista

Arista is a California-based networking company which contentiously competes with its rival Cisco in the space for network switches.

Currently, Arista trades around $266 a share, with a market cap of nearly $20 billion. Morgan Stanley has a price target of $310 per share for the company.

Aspeed

Aspeed is a Taiwanese company in the System in a Chip (SoC) space. The company sells chips for server management and desktop virtualization.

Aspeed trades on the Taipei Stock Exchange. It's currently valued at 744 Taiwanese dollars, but Morgan Stanley has a price target of 777 Taiwanese dollars, and expects the company to "bear fruit in 2019."

CyrusOne

CyrusOne is a Dallas, Texas-based real estate trust company, which invests in data centers from which other companies rent capacity. The company has partnerships with Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure to provide hybrid cloud solutions, in which their clouds integrate with CyrusOne-operated servers.

The company currently trades around $66 with a market cap around $6.6 billion. Morgan Stanley has a price target of $68.

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