Court documents: Satya Nadella said Azure's cloud server business had $34B in revenue in the year to June 2022; AWS generated $72B in revenue in the same period
For years Microsoft has kept a lid on details about the true size of its Azure cloud server rental business …
The InformationAaron Holmes
Context & Ripple Effects
Microsoft has spent a decade disclosing Azure only as a growth rate — 102% back in 2016, 46% YoY in the quarter covered by January 2022 results — while keeping the absolute size of the business out of its reporting. Gartner's 2020 survey put Azure at $12.7B against AWS's $26.2B, but that was an estimate, not a company-stated figure.
Court documents now supply the missing denominator straight from Nadella: $34B for Azure's server rental business in the year to June 2022 versus AWS's $72B — roughly half AWS's size, which squares with the '~50% five years ago' baseline analysts cited when they later pegged Azure at ~75% of AWS by early 2024. A number Microsoft never chose to publish is now part of the public legal record.
First-order effects
Analysts covering Microsoft gain their first company-sourced absolute Azure revenue figure, letting them convert the quarterly growth-rate disclosures into dollar terms instead of relying on Gartner-style estimates.
Microsoft's long-standing practice of withholding Azure's absolute revenue is undercut: the figure is now citable from court filings regardless of what the company discloses in earnings materials.
Second-order effects
AWS's own scale claim now has a verified comparator — every future 'Azure closing the gap' narrative gets benchmarked against the $34B/$72B ratio rather than third-party survey data.
Google and other hyperscalers face the same exposure risk: once one executive's private revenue statement surfaces in litigation, rivals' undisclosed segment figures become the next targets for court-document mining.
Third-order effects
If litigation keeps forcing disclosure, hyperscaler market-share measurement migrates from analyst estimation toward legal-record evidence, raising the cost of strategic opacity for every cloud provider.
The arc from $34B (FY2022) through the ~75%-of-AWS estimate to Azure surpassing $100B in FY2026 suggests court-revealed baselines will become reference points for judging whether AI-driven cloud growth is real or reclassified existing workloads.
The trend: Cloud-market measurement is shifting from vendor-controlled disclosure and analyst estimates toward figures pried loose by litigation, as compute scale becomes the metric that decides AI-era standing.
NEW: The size of Microsoft's Azure cloud server business—one of its most closely guarded secrets—surfaced in an internal MSFT presentation that was posted online (then deleted) as an exhibit in the FTC's lawsuit against Microsoft https://www.theinformation.com/ ...
The Information reporting that according to internal documents posted by federal antitrust regulators $MSFT Azure's 12-month revenue ending on June 22 is half the size of $AMZN 's AWS. Honestly expected Azure to be bigger by now, makes AWS look even bigger now.
Other details from the now-deleted exhibit: - Microsoft estimated that its total ad revenue was bigger than Snap, Twitter, and Pinterest combined - Microsoft is plotting new cloud PC products to compete with Google's “Chromebook threat” https://www.theinformation.com/ ...
Depends on the growth rate vs AWS . Is the gap closing or not ? That is impressive from one standpoint but shows the MSFT has a lot of catching up to do . https://twitter.com/...
It's not clear whether the exhibit was unsealed accidentally or if it was meant to become public. Most exhibits in the FTC case have been deleted from the court's website after it became clear that at least 2 documents were improperly redacted.
Oops — the FTC may have accidentally leaked a 91-page presentation Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella gave to his board in June 2022. The presentation is a worthwhile read for investors, competitors and onlookers: https://www.theinformation.com/ ... $msft
“Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told the company's board of directors that the cloud server business within Azure would generate $34 billion in revenue in the 12 months ending June that year.” https://www.theinformation.com/ ... [image]
We always knew that Microsoft wasn't refusing to disclose Azure's numbers because they were good, but I didn't expect them to be this bad. Google Cloud has the attention span of a goldfish and is still only $8 billion behind them. https://twitter.com/...
I'd want to be precise about that - is it just IaaS and not any of the PaaS services like AKS, CosmosDB, AVD, Azure ML, Azure AD etc? I'm assuming for the purposes of the court case that Microsoft is playing poor little old me whenever it can. https://twitter.com/...