They are known to use cloud services from Azure (and I assume other providers). If they’re going to run in public clouds + on prem, Linux makes sense. And if y

They are known to use cloud services from Azure (and I assume other providers). If they’re going to run in public clouds + on prem, Linux makes sense. And if you’re doing Linux the x86-64 currently makes a ton of sense too. As you mentioned they’d have to contribute to Asahi, which would take up resources. Even ignoring that the price/performance on Apple hardware in server workloads may not be worth it. Even if it’s slightly better (they don’t pay retail) the fact that it’s a different setup than they run in Azure plus special work to rack them compared to bog-standard 1U PCs, etc may mean it simply isn’t worth it.