Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella said sales of Azure cloud-computing services represented more than half of $110 billion of cloud revenue in fiscal 2023, the first time that Azure has accounted for the majority of the company’s annual cloud-computing business.
That represents a gain from Azure revenue of about $34 billion in fiscal 2022 — a figure disclosed as part of the US Federal Trade Commission’s lawsuit seeking to halt Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard Inc.
Some of the growth was fueled by Azure OpenAI, which is Microsoft’s cloud service for businesses that want to use OpenAI’s artificial-intelligence tools. The offering now has 11,000 customers, Nadella said Tuesday on a conference call following the software maker’s fourth-quarter earnings report. That compares with the 4,500 that Microsoft reported in mid-May.
