Microsoft dips even as Meta Platforms picks Azure to be strategic cloud provider
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Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) shares dipped on Wednesday even as the company signed a deal with Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:FB) for its Azure unit to be a strategic cloud provider for Meta.
As part of the deal, Meta (FB) will expand how much it uses Azure's supercomputing power in order to expand and accelerate its artificial intelligence research. To do so, it will use a "dedicated Azure cluster" of 5400 GPUs that have Nvidia's (NVDA) A100 Tensor Core 80GB GPUs.
According to the statement, Meta (FB) started using Microsoft (MSFT) Azure's virtual machines for large-scale AI research.
"We are excited to deepen our collaboration with Azure to advance Metaâs AI research, innovation and open-source efforts in a way that benefits more developers around the world," Jerome Pesenti, VP of AI, Meta, said in a statement. 
âWith Azureâs compute power and 1.6 [terabytes]/[second] of interconnect bandwidth per [virtual machine] we are able to accelerate our ever-growing training demands to better accommodate larger and more innovative AI models," Pesenti continued. "Additionally, weâre happy to work with Microsoft in extending our experience to their customers using PyTorch in their journey from research to production.â
Microsoft (MSFT) shares were fractionally lower at $259.48 in mid-day trading on Wednesday, while Meta Platforms (FB) tacked on roughly 0.5% to $182.05.
Last month, Microsoft (MSFT) said Azure saw revenue rise 46% year-over-year, or 49% in constant currency in its most recent quarter, helping the company generate a total of $49.4 billion in sales.
On Monday, investment firm Jefferies cut the per-share price targets on several tech companies, including Microsoft (MSFT), citing "stiffening economic headwinds and the risk of recession looming" over the economy.