Microsoft’s Azure growth slows, testing investors’ patience

Microsoft Corp.’s Azure cloud-computing service experienced a slowdown in quarterly growth, testing the patience of investors eager to see returns from significant investments in artificial intelligence products.

Revenue from Azure, Microsoft’s primary growth engine in recent years, increased by 29 per cent in the fiscal fourth quarter, compared with a 31 per cent rise in the previous period. About 8 percentage points of the increase in the recent period were attributable to Al, up from 7 percentage points in the prior quarter.

“It was really about the cloud services number — it needed to just be a little higher,” Doug Clinton, a managing partner at Deepwater Asset Management, said on Bloomberg Television. Still, the accelerated contribution from Al confirms business momentum with that emerging technology, wrote Raimo Lenschow, an analyst at Barclays.