How much revenue does Azure make?
Azure is the second largest cloud computing provider, and also the fastest growing. Unfortunately, most industry analysts use Microsoft’s reported revenue, growth, and margin numbers for “Server products and cloud services” as a proxy for Azure revenue, which is simply not accurate since a variety of other product lines are included in that total. Given the importance of Azure to Microsoft’s business, one could be forgiven for wondering if there’s some intentional obfuscation going on, if only to make it a little harder for competitors to understand the actual dynamics of the business.
Let’s walk through the 2022 numbers to illustrate.
- Microsoft Intelligent Cloud made a reported $81.8 billion in revenue.
- One layer down, “server products and Azure” generated $73.9 billion. Unfortunately, these numbers are not broken down further in a consistent fashion, rendering them somewhat useless since this line item includes Azure, SQL Server, Visual Studio, GitHub, Nuance, and other products. What a grab bag!
- However, analyzing the reported growth rates and revenue totals by quarter, we can find that “Azure and cloud services” comes out to $49.6 billion, after removing server products and enterprise services.
- Further breaking down “Azure and cloud services”, we estimate that GitHub and Nuance account for about $1.9 billion and can also be separated out.
- Finally, we are left with an Azure-only revenue line of $47.7 billion for 2022. It’s still quite impressive, especially considering such a large business was still growing 35% year over year, but a very different number than what the company reports.
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