Microsoft has never disclosed Azure’s quarterly revenue in dollar terms. They typically just share growth rates or vaguely explain sales milestones. But on Wednesday, in another record quarter, Azure reported a healthy $33.2 billion in revenue for the July-September period, up 48% year-over-year.
The disclosure will allow investors to more directly compare Azure’s performance to Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud, whose parent companies already report cloud revenue in dollars on a quarterly basis.
Alphabet, which also reported results on Wednesday, said Google Cloud generated $30.7 billion in revenue in the quarter, slightly ahead of Azure. But Google Cloud’s revenue, which includes Google’s Workspace subscriptions, nearly doubled year over year, and grew about twice as fast as Azure, according to TechCrunch’s calculations.
Azure, where businesses rent computing power to run applications, SaaS, and build and run AI models, is now Microsoft’s largest and fastest-growing product line, according to the company’s own numbers. This accounted for about 36% of Microsoft’s quarterly revenue of $92.3 billion.
Azure sales also exceeded analysts’ expectations of $32.3 billion by about $850 million. Azure’s 48% growth rate also exceeded the 44% to 45% that Microsoft CFO Amy Hood predicted during a July earnings call.
Azure sits within Agents and Infrastructure, one of two new business segments that Microsoft introduced this quarter. Microsoft previously reported three segments: Productivity and Business Processes, Intelligent Cloud, and More Personal Computing. The new Agents and Infrastructure division, which groups the Azure and Microsoft 365 cloud businesses, brought in $76.8 billion, up 25% year-over-year.
Amazon will report its financial results on Thursday. Analysts also expect the company’s cloud service, Amazon Web Services, to grow. This has been the biggest cloud since time immemorial, and no one expects Microsoft to surpass it at this point. But the competition continues, as all companies report their actual amounts.
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