After sailing through the pandemic and weathering the first waves of economic uncertainty earlier this year, the cloud service provider market has finally hit a rough patch.
While Microsoft’s intelligent cloud business, which includes Azure, continued to grow, its rate of expansion slowed. Its segment revenue grew grew 20% to $20.3 billion in Q1 2023 for the period ending Sept. 30. But that was down 11 percentage points from 31% growth for the same quarter last year.
Alphabet, Google’s parent company, reported $6.9 billion in revenue from Google Cloud in its Q3 earnings report for the period ending Sept. 30, up 37% year over year. That still represents a slowdown from the 45% year-over-year growth in cloud revenues Alphabet reported in Q3 of 2021. Google Cloud lost $699 million this quarter.
