Azure is one of the big three in cloud computing - Google, Amazon, and Microsoft

And they also run some pretty large things that could be run on ARM with no visible impact to customers. Bing, hosted Outlook, etc.

Sure, but it is a single cloud.

Will you ever be able to buy these products? And would you ever want to? Windows Server 20XX on ARMv8 will forever remain a niche platform at best.

> Sure, but it is a single cloud.

Not sure what that means. Arguably, the cloud computing business is what's driving high performance computing at this point. Go look at the benchmarks for Ryzen, for example. It's pretty clear who AMD is targeting with that architecture (hint: games aren't in desperate need of better multi-core performance).

> Will you ever be able to buy these products? And would you ever want to? Windows Server 20XX on ARMv8 will forever remain a niche platform at best.

Did you read the article? This is about MS supporting ARM in their cloud offerings (and porting windows to do so). Whether or not consumers will purchase these solutions seems irrelevant in this context.

Their new datacenter is a mile long. It would be profitable to sell chips just for the one datacenter.

Most of the world you take for granted runs on Azure. I don't mean by numbers, but by importance. Big enterprise loves it. AWS is technically bigger but its mostly for web technologies. Many companies run on some level of Azure or O365. Its insane how big MS is in this space and how quietly because they don't get the big headlines due to Windows server space being 'boring enterprise stuff.'

MS is one of the major players in open compute and in the top three for cloud services.

According to the article:

"its Azure service is No. 2 in cloud infrastructure behind Amazon, and it's one of the biggest server buyers"

You don't have to be "dominant" to have influence.

They are quite large in the server space: http://map.buildazure.com