No. of Recommendations: 4
One of the reason Microsoft's Azure Cloud is growing so fast is because both Fortune 500s and SMBs tend to have their business users in Active Directory (AD) for logins and authentication. So when they make the decision that they need to move to the Cloud for business agility and pay-as-you-go pricing, these businesses just need to migrate their on-premises AD to Azure AD, and their users can instantly log into Cloud VMs.
It's just a small step from there to start migrating terabytes of database data and files to Azure, where storage is cheap and available instantly.
And because the data is in Azure Cloud, machine learning models like Chat GPT will be run there for inferences and fine tuning. This is an example of the "rich getting richer". Microsoft's success is feeding on itself. Their CFO Amy Hood's expectation that AI-driven Office Copilot will be the fastest new product to hit $10 billion in annual revenue is a perfect example of what I said on the Berkshire board: these megacap software-driven companies can leverage their existing tech and customer footprint to create new multi-billion revenue streams that nobody could have predicted a few months ago.
That being said. Amazon, the #1 company in Cloud services, is not sitting still, and keeps adding billions in new revenue every year itself. We just heard today that Meta (fka Facebook) has just released its monster Gen AI model, LLaMa, as open source, and Amazon Web Services is already making it available as a Chat GPT competitor in its cloud. AWS also partners with AI21 Labs, Stability AI and Hugging Face to offer Gen AI models.
We are living in very interesting times.
