Since the last quarter of 2023, Azure growth has increased by 2 percentage points. Meanwhile, top rivals Amazon and Alphabet have seen cloud growth over that stretch accelerate by 7 points and 13 points, respectively. It's a matter of particular importance to investors, because Microsoft now has tens of billions of dollars in quarterly capital expenditures to meet cloud and AI needs of customers.
A Microsoft spokesperson didn't provide a comment.
Microsoft operates in many other markets. But investors gravitate to cloud first, because it's a sizable category that's still rapidly expanding as companies continue to move away from owning and operating their own data centers and as they add heftier workloads.