So what made the difference to investors? Microsoft’s Azure — the cloud computing business — growth of 38 per cent was all of a percentage point less than the market expected (management explained growth would have been higher, but its supply of GPU chips was limited and it allocated some of them to other priorities). More serious, perhaps, is vague talk in the market that Copilot, the company’s AI assistant, is not quite as successful as hoped, and OpenAI, which makes the technology that Copilot runs on, and on which Microsoft has bet heavily in general, has lost some edge to Google’s Gemini.