Microsoft has been in touch with Pinterest in recent months to be able to take over the company. The calls are no longer active. It is not clear why the takeover did not go through.
The acquisition would be especially interesting for Microsoft because of the data from users and the Azure platform, the Financial Times writes. Microsoft would like to acquire large online communities in order to bring larger customers to Azure. Partly for this reason, it previously took over GitHub and LinkedIn, the newspaper says. Pinterest now has 459 million monthly users and uses Amazon Web Services.
The idea is that Microsoft could improve its own apps and services with the user data. At the same time, a social medium where users share many images and interests could be interesting for Microsoft’s marketing department and for training artificial intelligence.
In one year, the value of Pinterest has increased by more than six hundred percent, now the company is worth about 42 billion euros. It is not the first time that Microsoft’s takeover of a social medium has not gone through. Microsoft wanted to take over TikTok’s American activities, but owner ByteDance ultimately chose Oracle.