Microsoft Azure

Headquarters

Redmond, Washington, USA

Website

azure.microsoft.com

Founded

2010

Listing

Cloud division of Microsoft (MSFT)

Investment

• OpenAI: Microsoft's historical exclusive infrastructure partnership with OpenAI continues, though its exclusivity ended following OpenAI's 2025 AWS compute deal.
• Anthropic: Microsoft committed $13 billion as an investor in Anthropic's 2026 funding round, part of a broader multi-cloud AI investment strategy.

Dependency

• Arm Holdings: Microsoft's Cobalt server CPUs are built on Arm's architecture.
• Nebius: Microsoft has a multibillion-dollar contracted capacity agreement with Nebius, part of Nebius' $40 billion+ contracted revenue from investment-grade customers.
• IREN: Microsoft signed a $9.7 billion cloud capacity deal with IREN, deploying GPUs at IREN's Childress, Texas campus in phases through 2026.
• Arista Networks: Microsoft is Arista Networks' second-largest customer at roughly 16% of revenue, deploying Arista's Etherlink AI fabric across Azure AI infrastructure.
• Intel: Microsoft plans to produce its next-generation Maia 2 AI accelerator on Intel's 18A process node at Intel Foundry.
• Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company: Microsoft's Maia 200 AI accelerator chip is fabricated on TSMC's 3-nanometer process.
• Advanced Micro Devices: Microsoft Azure added AMD MI300X-accelerated virtual machines to its AI infrastructure alongside its own Maia silicon and NVIDIA GPUs, and in July 2026 expanded the partnership further to deploy AMD's Helios rack-scale solution powering new ND MI455X v7 VMs plus AMD EPYC-based HXv2/HDv2 VMs, maintaining a multi-vendor chip strategy.
• Constellation Energy: Microsoft signed a 20-year power purchase agreement for 100% offtake of the revived 837MW Three Mile Island Unit 1, restarted via a $1.6 billion Constellation Energy investment, expected online in 2028.
• GE Vernova: Microsoft ordered seven GE Vernova gas turbines for its roughly 2.7GW Project Kilby data center in West Texas, with first power targeted for 2028.
• NVIDIA: Azure depends on securing large volumes of NVIDIA GPUs to meet AI compute demand from Azure AI services and enterprise customers.
• AI Data Centers: Azure depends on large-scale data center capacity and power availability to deploy AI infrastructure at hyperscale.
• AI Data Centers: Microsoft Azure operates AI data centers at hyperscale to deliver Azure AI services.
• Marvell Technology: Marvell supplies IP and back-end services for Microsoft's custom Maia AI accelerators.

Supply Chain

• Mistral AI: Mistral AI struck a multibillion-dollar deal with Microsoft in July 2026 to expand Azure computing infrastructure in Europe, giving Azure customers access to Mistral's frontier models hosted on data centers in France.
• OpenAI: OpenAI's historical infrastructure partnership with Microsoft Azure continues, though a 2025 compute deal with AWS ended Microsoft's prior exclusivity over serving OpenAI's frontier models.
• Anthropic: Anthropic depends in part on Microsoft Azure infrastructure, with Microsoft committing $13 billion as an investor in Anthropic's 2026 funding round.
• ServiceNow: ServiceNow runs significant infrastructure on major cloud providers including Microsoft Azure.
• Snowflake: Snowflake's data cloud runs on top of major cloud infrastructure providers including Azure.
• Shopify: Shopify runs significant infrastructure on cloud providers including Microsoft Azure.
• MongoDB: MongoDB Atlas, its managed database service, runs across major cloud providers including Azure.
• Atlassian: Atlassian Cloud runs on major cloud infrastructure providers including Azure.
• Confluent: Confluent Cloud runs across major cloud infrastructure providers including Azure.

Development

• Satya Nadella: Microsoft Azure's AI-focused strategic direction has been led by CEO Satya Nadella since 2014.
• Microsoft Maia: Microsoft develops its own Maia custom silicon, designed as a first-class citizen within Azure optimized for OpenAI inference workloads.

Competition / Other

• Cloud Computing & Data Centers: Microsoft Azure is among the largest hyperscale cloud providers, guiding to roughly $190 billion in calendar year 2026 capital expenditure.
• Microsoft: Azure is Microsoft's cloud computing division and the infrastructure backbone of its AI strategy.
• Amazon Web Services: Microsoft Azure competes directly with AWS and Google Cloud for hyperscaler cloud infrastructure and AI compute customers.
• Alphabet (Google): Microsoft Azure competes with Google Cloud (and AWS) for enterprise cloud and AI infrastructure workloads.