Microsoft's Azure crossed $100B in annual revenue, driven by AI. The milestone has indirect implications for crypto infrastructure, highlighted by a $9.7B deal with former Bitcoin miner IREN.
Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform crossed $100 billion in annual revenue for the first time in the fiscal third quarter, the company said.
The overall Microsoft Cloud segment reported $54.5 billion in quarterly revenue, up 29% from a year earlier. Azure and related cloud services grew 40%. Microsoft’s AI business hit a $37 billion annualized run rate, a 123% increase year-over-year.
The engine behind that growth is artificial intelligence, not traditional productivity software. One deal in particular shows the scale of capital flowing into AI cloud infrastructure. In November 2025, Microsoft signed a $9.7 billion AI cloud agreement with IREN, a company that previously operated as a Bitcoin miner. The deal included $5.8 billion worth of GPUs sourced from Dell.
Microsoft retired its Azure Blockchain Service in September 2021 and shifted to general-purpose cloud infrastructure that supports blockchain applications alongside other workloads. No specific cryptocurrency token is directly tied to Azure’s revenue performance. You won’t see SOL or ETH moving on Microsoft’s earnings calls.
But the IREN arrangement illustrates how the boundary between crypto-native companies and traditional cloud customers is dissolving. Former miners becoming AI cloud partners and exchanges using institutional-grade cloud services all point to a world where crypto’s backend increasingly resembles that of any other industry.
The concentration risk remains. As more crypto infrastructure migrates to a handful of hyperscale cloud providers, the decentralization thesis gets harder to defend. Running a so-called decentralized protocol on Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud introduces single points of failure that critics have flagged for years.
Microsoft shares traded at $391.46, down 0.48% on the session. The AlphaScala Alpha Score for MSFT is 61 out of 100, a Moderate rating. IREN, the former miner now tied to Microsoft’s cloud expansion, carries an Alpha Score of 29, classed as Weak and trades under the ticker IREN.
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