Microsoft is spending more money than it has in years, but it might not be enough. In its latest earnings report, Microsoft revealed that its spending on infrastructure jumped by 79% compared to last year, reaching $14 billion. However, this increase in spending is much faster than the rise in revenue, which only went up by 17% during the same period.
Despite this hefty investment, Microsoft is facing a shortage of data center infrastructure, especially for deploying artificial intelligence (AI) models.
According to Microsoft’s Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood, there’s more demand for their services than they can currently supply.
The demand for computing power is growing rapidly as companies incorporate AI features into their products, like human-like generative AI features. This trend was spurred by OpenAI and its ChatGPT chatbot.
Microsoft has joined in by adding assistants to its Teams communication app, Bing search engine, and other services. This technology can do things like summarize meeting notes, write emails, and explain information found on the internet.
However, Microsoft isn’t the only company struggling with a shortage of AI hardware.
Nvidia, the leading developer of processors for training and deploying AI models, has also been facing supply constraints. Nvidia’s revenue has more than tripled in consecutive quarters, showing the high demand for its products. Now, Microsoft, one of Nvidia’s major customers, is feeling the pressure of this shortage.
During the third quarter of the fiscal year, Microsoft saw a 31% increase in revenue from its Azure cloud services, with 7% of that growth coming from AI-related activities. Amy Hood mentioned that the capacity issue might have affected the results of their AI efforts and will likely continue to impact them in the fourth quarter.
This limitation in supply means that Microsoft has less available capacity to offer to clients for deploying AI models during the inference stage.
Azure is crucial to Microsoft’s future, bringing in tens of billions of dollars in revenue each quarter and growing faster than many other parts of the company.
Among the services within Azure, AI stands out as a highlight, attracting new clients as Microsoft competes with Amazon Web Services.
Hood stated that capital expenditures will significantly increase in the current quarter, mainly for expanding cloud infrastructure. She also emphasized the need for higher capital expenditures in the new fiscal year, starting on July 1st.
Microsoft aims to expand its capacity to meet the increasing demand for its cloud and AI products, as Hood highlighted.
