Microsoft, the world’s second-most valuable company, is dumping enormous sums of money into its artificial intelligence efforts. At the same time, the company is earning money hand over fist. Investors are thrilled.
The enterprise software giant reported fiscal fourth-quarter results that exceeded expectations on Wednesday as the company races to acquire datacenters and talent, which continues to be investigated by investors. The company predicted its capital expenditure for the next fiscal year would top $100bn, a 14% increase from the year prior.
It’s the fifth quarter in a row that Microsoft has beaten Wall Street’s expectations. Shares in the company, which is celebrating its 50-year anniversary since it was founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in April 1975, are trading a near record of $513, up 22% since the start of the year.
The software giant’s stock rose more than 7% in extended trading on Wednesday.
Microsoft, like rivals Alphabet/Google and Amazon, is in an all-out race for datacenter capacity to meet demand for AI. Last week, Alphabet announced it will spend $85bn in capital expenditures in 2025, a $10bn increase on what it estimated at the start of the year. Amazon is looking to spend $100bn over the same period.
“Cloud and AI is the driving force of business transformation across every industry and sector,” said Satya Nadella, chairman and chief executive officer of Microsoft. “We’re innovating across the tech stack to help customers adapt and grow in this new era, and this year, Azure surpassed $75bn in revenue, up 34%, driven by growth across all workloads,” Nadella said in a statement.
Microsoft reported revenue of $76.4bn, against consensus estimates of $73.81bn, and earnings per share of $3.65, against estimates of $3.37. That corresponds to revenue growth of 18% year-over-year. Revenue in the same period a year earlier came in at $64.73bn.
The extraordinary spending on data centers, necessary to power AI products, comes as companies are increasingly outsourcing their computing demands to the cloud.
Before the earnings were released, Dan Ives, a financial analyst at Wedbush said Microsoft was on track to $4tn market value “shortly”, and $5tn over the next 18 months as shares moving up to $600 as companies accelerate their adoption of AI technologies.
“This was a slam-dunk quarter for MSFT with cloud and AI driving significant business transformation across every sector and industry as the company continues to capitalize on the AI Revolution unfolding front and center,” Ives said in a statement after Microsoft’s numbers were released.
The extraordinary cost of hiring top AI talent is also coming into focus. OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, has said Meta was offering $100m in signing bonuses to recruit talent from his company. Facebook parent Meta also reportedly offered a senior Apple engineer $200m to join its “superintelligence” team.
Microsoft, meanwhile, is reported to be offering high-level engineers a yearly salary of as much as $408,000, not including a one-time stock award of as much as $1.9m, plus an annual stock award of $1,476,000, according to Business Insider.
