They’ve built out a global network presence… it would be silly for them to not at least try. I really hope they build a cloud; AWS and GCP are the only serious players in the game but neither seem too concerned about lowering prices. It’s all about providing “managed X” and “hybrid Y” for them.
I would at least throw Azure into the serious players category. You have companies like Digital Ocean trying to compete as well, definitely not as many products though.
Honourable mention for Scaleway, too. I use their products because they just work, they're cheap, have good tf modules etc. Helps that they're in the EU.
Azure is kept afloat mostly due to the windows ecosystem. They won’t go away as long as that exists but I don’t see them growing into a significant player.