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I found a lot of factual inaccuracies within this report which leads me to believe this either an attempt to tarnish the Azure brand or (as someone else pointed out) the author of this has invested in it’s competitors. For example, they state the following which is trivial to show as completely false:

> Amazon is already building an ecosystem around its own chips, while Microsoft has yet to deploy any custom chips in Azure.

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Yup. You're totally right.

> Tom Forte, CFA (Managing Director, Senior Research Analyst), and/or members of his/her household, holds a long position in securities of Amazon.com, Inc.

Hmm... actually don't think that's inaccurate. What customer-facing homegrown silicon does Microsoft offer? I know they have "custom" Intel chips (as do all the major cloud providers), but AFAIK they don't have anything like Amazon's Graviton (which is on its second generation) or Google TPU (on its third generation). They also don't offer Xilinx FPGAs to customers AFAIK. I know they are hiring in custom SoC development, but they nothing customer facing in Azure yet.

"They also don't offer Xilinx FPGAs to customers AFAIK"

They do have Intel Arria (Altera) FPGAs:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/machine-learning/how-...

Edit: And some evidence that it's a custom setup: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2018/0...

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