Microsoft’s Azure Growth Slows, Testing Investors’ Patience
- Cloud services revenue gains 29%, down from 31% last quarter
- Capital expenditures hit $19 billion on data center build-out
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Microsoft Corp.’s Azure cloud-computing service posted a slowdown in quarterly growth, testing the patience of investors anxious to see a payoff from huge investments in artificial intelligence products.
Revenue from Azure, Microsoft’s main growth engine in recent years, rose 29% in the fiscal fourth quarter, compared with a 31% jump in the previous period. About 8 percentage points of the increase in the recent period was attributable to AI, up from 7 percentage points in the prior quarter.