Chevron just announced it has selected Microsoft to be its preferred cloud provider. The seven-year deal marks a big win in the race for dominance in the high-growth area. Last week, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Amazon all said cloud services accounted for a major portion of earnings growth. Forbes Staff Writer Alex Konrad says while Microsoft and Chevron didn't disclose terms of the deal, he expects the price tag to be in the hundreds of millions... maybe even billions of dollars... over the seven-year term. Konrad says Chevron chose Microsoft for several reasons: the two companies already had a relationship in other business areas, its geographic coverage was appealing, and the deal will allow the companies to work together and build proactive research. In the latest quarter, Microsoft grew its Azure cloud revenue by 90 percent.