Can Microsoft Beat IBM In AI And Amazon In Cloud?

Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) is building out Azure as the first artificial intelligence (AI) supercomputer, the company's CEO, Satya Nadella, said at an event in Dublin. Microsoft's existing Azure tools for machine learning (ML) and cognitive computing will see massive adoption due to the company's foray into making the AI supercomputer. This initiative has the potential to empower Microsoft to challenge even IBM's (NYSE:IBM) AI expertise by posing a significant threat to the latter's cognitive computing platform Watson and business intelligence (BI) platform Cognos. With currently being the number 2 player in the cloud IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) market following Amazon's (NASDAQ:AMZN) AWS, Microsoft can become one of the leading AI players alongside IBM (or might even surpass IBM). At the same time, the software giant can become the number 1 cloud IaaS player, displacing AWS in a shorter span of time than earlier expected.