A rumor I heard somewhere - MS supposedly built x86 emulation for ARM a few years back, and created a demo on top of some vendor's ARM servers for transparent Azure x86 on ARM (in addition to regular ARM VM SKUs of course). But rather than move forward with this as a public offering on Azure, they used it to put the squeeze on Intel/AMD, and they got rock-bottom price on hardware in return for holding-off on ARM adoption.

Sounds like someone may have gotten a massive bonus that year, but may have significantly delayed any ARM efforts on Azure...