Who Microsoft buys from and sells to
Sells cloud capacity, software subscriptions and AI services; buys accelerators and rents extra GPU capacity from neoclouds.
Part of Cybersecurity spending
Buys from 6
- NVIDIANVDAthe accelerators Azure rents out
- AMDAMDa second accelerator source
- NebiusNBISGPU capacity rented from a neocloudup to $17.4B over five years (Nebius filing)
- IRENIRENNVIDIA GPU capacity at its Texas campus$9.7B over five years (reported)
- CoreWeaveCRWVGPU capacity rented back from a neocloud by the hour
- VertivVRTpower and cooling for the halls
Sells to 7
- Businesses and enterprisesMicrosoft 365, Azure, Dynamics and LinkedIn seats
- ConsumersWindows, Xbox, Microsoft 365 Personal and Surface
- DellDELLa Windows licence on every PC it ships
- HPHPQthe same, on HP and OMEN PCs
- OpenAIAzure compute for training and serving ChatGPT$250B incremental Azure commitment (Oct 2025)
- AnthropicAzure compute for Claude$30B Azure commitment (Nov 2025)
- US federal governmentcloud, Office and security licences
Where the chain could break
- A large share of commercial backlog is one customer, OpenAI
- Azure growth is capped by GPU and power availability, much of it from NVIDIA
- Neocloud leases add fixed multi-year payments whatever the utilisation
Competes with
- AmazonAMZNcloud share
- AlphabetGOOGLthe same, and increasingly the model layer
- OracleORCLAI cloud capacity for the same model labs
Mapped by hand from filings and company reporting, as of October 2026. It shows the relationships that matter most, not every contract: most are never disclosed, and agreements change.