  With the unprecedented reliance on cloud computing as the backbone for
storing today's big data, we argue in this paper that the role of the cloud
should be reshaped from being a passive virtual market to become an active
platform for monetizing the big data through Artificial Intelligence (AI)
services. The objective is to enable the cloud to be an active platform that
can help big data service providers reach a wider set of customers and cloud
users (i.e., data consumers) to be exposed to a larger and richer variety of
data to run their data analytic tasks. To achieve this vision, we propose a
novel game theoretical model, which consists of a mix of cooperative and
competitive strategies. The players of the game are the big data service
providers, cloud computing platform, and cloud users. The strategies of the
players are modeled using the two-sided market theory that takes into
consideration the network effects among involved parties, while integrating the
externalities between the cloud resources and consumer demands into the design
of the game. Simulations conducted using Amazon and google clustered data show
that the proposed model improves the total surplus of all the involved parties
in terms of cloud resources provision and monetary profits compared to the
current merchant model.
