Microsoft’s revenue grew strongly last quarter, 31 percent growth in Azure revenue – IT Pro – News

Microsoft again achieved much higher revenue from its cloud services in the previous quarter. The company mainly owes this to the rise of AI tools such as Copilot, says CEO Satya Nadella. It is also striking that the company is making more and more money from Windows.

Microsoft’s revenue rose by 17 percent in the first quarter of this year, the company said when presenting its quarterly figures. Net profit increased by twenty percent. More than half of the total turnover came from Microsoft Cloud, which includes office suites such as Office. Microsoft achieved a turnover of $ 35.1 billion, out of a total quarterly turnover of $ 61.9 billion. Azure, which does not fall under Cloud, also grew strongly. Growth there was 31 percent compared to the previous quarter and amounted to a turnover of 26.7 billion dollars.

It is striking that Microsoft is making more and more money from Windows. This has been a loss-making part of the company in recent quarters, but in the past quarter turnover increased again by eleven percent. This was partly due to sales to OEMs, but there was also growth in direct sales and cloud services. Revenues from services for the Xbox also increased, mainly due to the acquisition of Activision-Blizzard. With its Personal Computing division, Microsoft achieved a turnover of $15.6 billion, an increase of 17 percent compared to the previous quarter.

Microsoft owes the higher turnover mainly to the arrival of artificial intelligence. This was done, among other things, by introducing a paid version of the Copilot assistant in Microsoft 365. The company does spend a lot of money on the growth of data centers; almost fourteen billion dollars went there last quarter. Microsoft wants to meet the high demand for AI applications on its Azure services.