Microsoft Azure: Microsoft’s cloud unit’s revenue surpasses estimations by $31.8 billion

Microsoft, during its quarterly earnings call revealed that its cloud unit surpassed $31.8 billion in revenue for the quarter, up by 24 percent YoY. This led to a 4% increase in the company’s stock market, bridging the value to $128 billion. 

"We have the most comprehensive cloud footprint with more than 60 data center regions worldwide, as well as the best AI infrastructure for both training and inference. And we also have our AI services deployed in more regions than any other cloud provider,” CEO Satya Nadella said.

Nadella added: "We continue to see more cloud migrations with Azure Arc. We are meeting customers where they are, helping them run apps across on-prem, edge, and multi-cloud environments. We now have 21,000 Arc customers, up 140 percent year over year. We are the only other cloud provider to run Oracle's database services, making it simpler for customers to migrate their on-prem Oracle databases to our cloud."

Microsoft CFO Amy Hood noted that Microsoft is anticipating Azure to continue growing by between 26 and 27 percent with an "increasing contribution from AI." Hood notes that this is in part because "AI workloads don't just use our AI services. They use data services and they use other things. And so, that combination, I think, looking on a competitive basis, we feel good about our execution, we feel good about taking share, and we feel good about consistent trends."