Leaked documents on Microsoft’s cloud business show Azure underperformed in 2022. Revenue isn’t even half that of its main competitor AWS.

Microsoft itself has so far been rather sparse in passing on results from the Azure cloud. In its quarterly financial reports, Microsoft groups all of its (many) cloud products under “intelligent cloud,” making it difficult to deduce exactly how much Azure services are bringing in. This is less than expected, as revealed at a hearing on the takeover of game developer Activision.

Documents leaked during the litigation show that Azure raised $34 billion over a 12-month period ending in June 2022. A huge sum, but still less than what cloud industry analysts were expecting.

Gap to AWS

The big competitor AWS, which makes its cloud sales much more transparent, achieved sales of 72 billion US dollars with its cloud services in the same period. The gap between AWS and Microsoft Azure still seems wide. Statista estimated the market share of the two cloud giants at 32 percent and 23 percent after the first quarter of 2023, so these ratios could be even further apart.

Now that the cards for Azure are on the table, we are curious to see whether Microsoft will communicate more transparently about its cloud business in the future. Not much is known about Azure’s profitability either. Microsoft had to reveal many secrets during the lawsuit. That’s how we learned that the future of Windows is in the cloud.