Isn't Microsoft too late to the chip game? Both their competitors AWS and GCP have their own ML training chips, while Azure has nothing. The article seems like they may have something by next year, but by that time the competition would have evolved even more. Nadella has executed on strategy brilliantly but on the cloud seems it seems like the tech innovation is a bit lagging. It hasn't mattered that much so far tho…
It feels like Microsoft realized that sales/support matters way more than technology when it comes to cloud services. See how Azure has a ton of users despite being much worse than AWS or GCP by every objective metric. I would imagine that Google's reputation as a company where it is impossible to ever talk to a human (even when you have a 7 figure annual spend) hurts them in this space.
Once people already are buying 20 products from you and have a good sales relationship of decades, selling them some cloud services is easy and might even lead to better deals on something else (Windows/Office)