Microsoft has been turning its OpenAI deal into a big business. Earlier this year, much of its Azure OpenAI offering, which provides access to OpenAI’s language models, was contingent on a single big spender: TikTok. But I’ve now seen a recent list of its top customers, and it’s clear that Microsoft has managed to diversify the business with a selection of major clients spending more than $1 million per month on Azure OpenAI services.

The software giant has a running list of what it considers its top 10 customers for Azure OpenAI, and I’m told Adobe and Meta both spent more than $1 million on Microsoft’s AI services in September alone to make the top 10 customer list. Both Adobe and Meta are primarily using Microsoft’s provisioned output for access to OpenAI models, which provides dedicated model processing capacity rather than Microsoft’s token-based offerings for text and image generation.

Meta and Adobe’s use of Azure OpenAI still falls far behind TikTok owner ByteDance’s, though. The Information reported earlier this year that TikTok was paying Microsoft almost $20 million per month to access OpenAI’s models, making up nearly a quarter of the revenue generated by Azure OpenAI at the time. ByteDance’s spending on Azure OpenAI is now less than 15 percent of Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI business, thanks in part to a more diverse amount of customer spending on Microsoft’s AI services and ByteDance spending less.

Abu Dhabi-based G42 is spending millions of dollars per month on Azure OpenAI services, making it Microsoft’s second-biggest customer behind ByteDance. Microsoft invested $1.5 billion in G42 earlier this year, so it looks like G42 is going to continue to be a key Azure OpenAI customer in the future.

In a sign of how Microsoft is mixing up its Azure OpenAI customers, earlier this year, Walmart was considered a top AI customer, but it no longer features in Microsoft’s top 10. The list can change from month to month, simply because spending on Azure OpenAI fluctuates based on the AI projects that Microsoft’s customers are building or testing.

Intuit has remained a steady customer for Azure OpenAI in recent months, even if its monthly spend isn’t at the levels of G42 or ByteDance. The TurboTax maker has made AI a core part of its platform and strategy, even training its own financial large language models on customer data.

Microsoft has also managed to entice China-based Ant Group, an affiliate of the Alibaba tech group, to spend at least $1 million on Azure OpenAI services. I understand Ant Group is primarily using Azure OpenAI for token-based AI services. China-based Beijing Sankuai Technology is also a top Azure OpenAI customer, making it the third Chinese company to make Microsoft’s top 10 list in September.

I asked Microsoft to comment on its top 10 Azure OpenAI customers, but the company wouldn’t discuss specifics. “The response to Azure OpenAI Service has been incredible — it’s our fastest-growing Azure service ever, doubling in growth over the last six months alone,” says Eric Boyd, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Azure AI platform. “From startups like Grammarly and Harvey, to multinational corporations like Vodafone and Epic, more than 60,000 organizations small and large are applying the capabilities of Azure OpenAI Service to drive AI innovation and business impact.”

Outside of Azure OpenAI, Microsoft also sells Copilot licenses to businesses that want AI features inside Office applications. Microsoft says that 70 percent of Fortune 500 companies use Microsoft 365 Copilot in some capacity, but it’s still unclear how much revenue is generated from Copilot licenses and how many Microsoft 365 Copilot users there actually are. Microsoft continues to publish customer studies on Copilot use, but it won’t put a number on revenue or usage yet.

Microsoft’s AI businesses will soon collectively hit a $10 billion annual run rate, though. “Our AI business is on track to surpass an annual revenue run rate of $10 billion next quarter, which will make it the fastest business in our history to reach this milestone,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella last month.

So there are some early signals that Microsoft’s AI push is starting to pay off, but with OpenAI still burning through cash and weighing on Microsoft earnings, investors will be looking closely for any signs of growth for Azure OpenAI and Microsoft 365 Copilot in the months ahead. 

The pad:

• Don’t expect an Xbox handheld anytime soon. Xbox chief Phil Spencer was in New York recently, and Bloomberg and Game File both sat down with him to talk about Microsoft’s gaming division. Spencer says Microsoft’s Xbox handheld is a few years out, the Xbox mobile store is delayed, and there are no “red lines” over what Xbox games could come to PlayStation. Disappointingly, there were no questions about Microsoft’s plans with AI for gaming, something the company is quietly working on.
• VMware Workstation and Fusion are now free for everyone. VMware made its Fusion and Workstation software for creating virtual machines free for personal use earlier this year, but now commercial customers can get it free of charge. Broadcom acquired VMware in 2022 for $61 billion, and the company is now focused on subscriptions and controversial price hikes for existing customers.
• Microsoft is killing off Windows 11’s Mail and Calendar apps by the end of the year. Pour one out for the built-in Mail and Calendar apps in Windows 11 because they’re about to stop working later this year. Microsoft wants people to use the new Outlook for Windows app instead, so the Mail, Calendar, and People apps will no longer be supported after December 31st.
• Indiana Jones and the Great Circle looks like it’s going to be a top Xbox game. MachineGames has published a nearly 15-minute deep dive into Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, showing off a lot of gameplay. There seems to be plenty of opportunity for exploration, mixed in with some good old-fashioned hand-to-hand brawling and combat. The game launches on December 9th, and it’s shaping up to be one of the best Xbox releases this year.
• Windows Intelligence could be on the way. There’s more evidence emerging that Microsoft could be getting ready to rebrand its Windows AI features into Windows Intelligence — not to be confused with Apple Intelligence, of course. Next week’s Microsoft Ignite might make for the ideal setting to announce such a move.
• Microsoft Edge is trying to forcefully get your Chrome tabs again. Microsoft has a history of employing tricks to get you to use Edge, and the latest one involves automatically opening Edge on a PC and trying to trick you into importing your Chrome tabs and data. I’m not a fan of Microsoft’s efforts here, and this ongoing behavior is definitely starting to erode trust in Windows.
• Microsoft launches Hyperlight, virtualization-based security for functions. Microsoft’s Azure Core Upstream team has developed Hyperlight, an open-source Rust library that “you can use to execute small, embedded functions using hypervisor-based protection for each function call at scale.” It’s an interesting project and the team has a detailed blog post all about it here.
• Adobe Premiere Pro now uses Intel’s NPUs. Intel, Microsoft, and Adobe have all teamed up to make Premiere Pro the first Adobe app to leverage an NPU on Copilot Plus PCs powered by Intel’s Core Ultra chips. The NPU is being used as a beta feature in Premiere Pro to automatically tag audio and classify clips like sound effects or music.
• Windows 11 on Arm ISOs are now available. If you’ve been waiting to clean install Windows 11 version 24H2 on a Qualcomm-powered machine, Microsoft has finally delivered the ISO files to do so. You’ll still need additional drivers to make this all work, but if you know what you’re doing, the ISO files are available here.
• Microsoft has revived the MSN brand with a fresh logo. MSN is back. The MSN branding is now taking over from Microsoft Start, which was originally launched to replace MSN. The MSN butterfly logo has also been overhauled to fit with Microsoft’s modern design language, and Microsoft says it’s “unifying our content services under the MSN brand to better simplify our experiences.”
• Xbox continues its push beyond consoles with new ad campaign. Microsoft has kicked off a new Xbox marketing campaign, and it’s all about defining what an Xbox is in 2024. “This is an Xbox” positions the Xbox brand as a way to play games across multiple devices, instead of just an Xbox console. It’s something Microsoft has been talking about for years, but this is very much Xbox Everywhere in action.

Correction: Last week’s Notepad issue initially misstated the structure of Microsoft’s gaming AI organization.

Thanks for subscribing and reading to the very end. I’ll be at Microsoft’s Ignite conference next week, so if you’re attending, please let me know, as it would be great to meet Notepad readers. You can reach me via email at notepad@theverge.com. 

If you’ve heard about any of Microsoft’s other secret projects, you can also speak to me confidentially on the Signal messaging app, where I’m tomwarren.01. I’m also tomwarren on Telegram, if you’d prefer to chat there.