While Microsoft typically blows out its Q4 cloud results, the world’s largest cloud provider said its Q4 cloud-revenue growth rate slipped to 27% from Q3’s 29% and provided a striking market-momentum contrast to the rapidly accelerating growth reported last week by Google Cloud.
As shown in the table below, Microsoft’s 27% growth rate for Q4 shows that its growth rate has been pretty much flat over the past five quarters: 27% for Q4, 29% for Q3, 26% for Q2, 26% for Q1, and 27% for Q4 of last year.
By contrast, Google Cloud’s growth rate is soaring, coming in at 82% in Q2, 63% in Q1, 48% in Q4, 34% in Q3, and 32% in Q2 of 2025.
Yes, it’s certainly true that Microsoft’s cloud revenue for this latest quarter — $59.3 billion — is much larger than that for Google Cloud — $24.8 billion.
But this is the key point: the wildly different growth trajectories show that customer momentum has shifted strongly toward Google Cloud, and correlates precisely to the global impact of the AI Revolution.
Those market dynamics are what led me to make a massive change in my Cloud Wars Top 10 rankings early this year when I boosted Google Cloud to the #1 spot from #2, elevated Oracle and its explosive cloud growth to #2 from #3, and dropped Microsoft to #3 from the #1 spot it held for several years.
| Q2 ’26 | Q1 | Q4 ’25 | Q3 | Q2 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Google Cloud | |||||
| Growth rate | 82% | 63% | 48% | 34% | 32% |
| Revenue | $24.8B | $20B | $17.7B | $15.2B | $13.6B |
| MSFT Cloud | |||||
| Growth rate | 27% | 29% | 26% | 26% | 27% |
| Revenue | $59.3B | $54.5B | $51.5B | $49.1B | $46.7B |
| AWS | |||||
| Growth rate | — | 28% | 24% | 20.2% | 17.5% |
| Revenue | — | $37.6B | $35.6B | $33.0B | $30.9B |
The remarkable thing about what’s taking place here is that Microsoft Cloud, with fiscal-2026 revenue totaling $214.4 billion, is growing faster than any comparably sized business has ever grown. So the shifting fortunes of Microsoft and Google Cloud are not due to any type of sub-par performance by Microsoft.
Instead, the remarkable acceleration from Google Cloud shows that it is simply outperforming not only Microsoft but also AWS in:
creating the AI and cloud solutions that customers want;
going to market in ways that customers prefer;
forging partnerships that drive more value for customers; and
delivering the rapid-fire enhanced business outcomes that customer CEOs are demanding.
We’ll get into that more in the near future, but here are some key takeaways from the Microsoft Q4 results:
- cloud revenue up 27% to $59.3 billion;
- RPO up 84% to $678 billion;
- Azure Q4 revenue was up 43%, and revenue for the full fiscal year topped $100 billion; and
- Dynamics 365 revenue was up 13%.
Final Thought
Tomorrow (July 30), Amazon’s Q2 numbers will come out, and we’ll be taking a close look at AWS’s numbers stack up against Google Cloud and Microsoft.
I’m expecting AWS’s Q2 growth rate to come in at about 31%. And although that would represent a very nice uplift in its business, it would also further underscore my ongoing contention that Google Cloud — for all the reasons cited above — has become by far the world’s leading AI and cloud provider in spite of the truly outstanding performances from both Microsoft and AWS.
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