Microsoft has never previously disclosed the quarterly revenue for Azure in US dollars. The company usually only provides growth rates or describes revenue milestones in a more general manner. However, on Wednesday, as it announced another record-breaking quarter, Microsoft revealed that Azure generated $33.2 billion in revenue for the July to September quarter, representing a 48% increase compared to the same period last year.

This disclosure allows investors to more directly compare the performance of Azure with Amazon Web Services (Amazon Web Services) and Google Cloud; the parent companies of these two companies have previously disclosed their cloud business revenues on a quarterly basis in US dollars.

Alphabet also released its financial report on Wednesday, stating that Google Cloud achieved revenue of $30.7 billion in the same quarter, which is slightly lower than Azure. However, Google Cloud's revenue also includes Google Workspace subscription services. According to TechCrunch, Google Cloud's revenue has roughly doubled compared to the same period last year, with a growth rate about twice that of Azure.

Azure is available for enterprises to rent computing power for running applications, SaaS, as well as for building and running AI models. According to Microsoft itself, Azure is now the company's largest and fastest-growing product line. It accounts for approximately 36% of Microsoft's quarterly revenue of $92.3 billion.

The revenue of Azure also exceeded analysts' expectations of $32.3 billion by about $850 million. The growth rate of Azure at 48% was also higher than the 44% to 45% forecast given by Microsoft's Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood during the company's July earnings conference call.

Azure falls under Agents, and, and Infra; this is one of the two new business divisions established by Microsoft this quarter. The three divisions previously reported by Microsoft were Productivity, and, Business Processes, Intelligent Cloud, and More Personal Computing. The new Agents, and, and Infra divisions have merged the cloud services of Azure and Microsoft 365, with revenue reaching 76.8 billion US dollars, a year-on-year increase of 25%.

Amazon will release its financial report on Thursday. Analysts also expect its cloud business Amazon Web Services to continue to grow. AWS has always been the largest cloud service since its inception, and currently, no one expects Microsoft to overtake it anytime soon. However, as companies begin to disclose their actual dollar revenues, this competition has become more apparent.