Microsoft blew off concerns of overspending on AI on Wednesday, reporting elevated earnings even as it faced an outage of its cloud computing service, Azure, and its office software suite, 365. The strong earnings report comes a day after a deal with OpenAI pushed the value of the tech giant to more than $4tn.
After its Xbox and investor relations pages went down, the company issued a statement that said: “We are working to address an issue affecting Azure Front Door that is impacting the availability of some services.”
The outage did not dampen the software giant’s financial outlook. The company reported first-quarter earnings of $3.72 per share against analysts’ expectations of $3.68, and revenue of $77.7bn against expectations of $75.5bn, according to Bloomberg consensus estimates.
That’s up from the $3.30 per share and $65.6bn in revenue the company saw in the same quarter last year.
Microsoft’s closely watched Azure cloud business grew by about 40%, also topping expectations. Operating income increased 24% to $38bn, more than projected. The company said its net income was $27.7bn.
“Our planet-scale cloud and AI factory, together with Copilots across high-value domains, is driving broad diffusion and real-world impact,” said Satya Nadella, chair and chief executive officer of Microsoft.
“It’s why we continue to increase our investments in AI across both capital and talent to meet the massive opportunity ahead.”
The company reported spending a larger-than-expected $34.9bn on new AI-related projects over the quarter, a 74% increase from the same period a year ago.
Microsoft’s earnings report comes as investors welcomed a revamped deal with OpenAI this week that has the once not-for-profit AI venture move toward becoming a for-profit entity and ties Microsoft more closely to the company.
Under the new agreement, Microsoft will hold 27% of the OpenAI Group PBC, valued at roughly $135bn, while OpenAI’s non-profit arm will hold a $130bn stake in the for-profit.
The earnings report gives Wall Street its latest look at the company’s AI and cloud growth. Graphic chipmaker Nvidia crossed a threshold on Wednesday to become the first company valued at $5tn as prospects for a US-China trade deal improved. The wider US stock market reached record highs earlier in the week, buoyed by hundreds of billions of dollars of investment in AI.
Microsoft’s earnings, along with Meta and Google parent Alphabet on Wednesday, begin a week of reports from the “Magnificent Seven”, the most valuable publicly traded companies in the world.
Investor anxiety over the possible inflation of a market bubble in AI-related investment similar to overinvestment in the mid-to-late 1990s have been growing. But bubbles are not necessarily visible until they burst.
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On an earnings call, Microsoft’s CFO, Amy Hood, sought to calm fears of an AI investment bubble, explaining that the company’s aggressive expansion in AI capacity, up 80% this year, and data centers doubling in size over the next two – was to meet demand that was already booked.
“Our need to continue to build out infrastructure is very high and that’s for booked business today and not any new booked business,” Hood said, adding that the company had been short of processing capacity for several quarters.
“I thought we were going to catch up but we are not,” Hood said. “Demand is increasing and usage is increasing very quickly. When you see these kinds of demand signals, and we know are behind, we need to spend. But we’re spending with a different amount of confidence in usage patterns and bookings, and we feel good about that.”
But, she warned, Microsoft is still “likely to be short of capacity”.
AI-related and cloud computing companies are valued at a combined $20tn, and gains across the market are 18% in 2025, or about $3.3tn, according to Reuters. Investors typically want to see that returns on AI capital spending, or CapEx, are following as the markets continue to reach record highs.
Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta and Amazon are projected to pump hundreds of billions into capital expenditures in their upcoming year, mostly into the construction of datacenters and associated infrastructure for artificial intelligence. Investors may be undeterred even without strong signs of revenue growth and settle for signs of strong AI adoption. The Dow Jones Industrial Average hit a milestone of 47,943 on Wednesday morning.
“With five of the Mag Seven reporting this week, what the market expects to hear is confirmation that all this AI CapEx is coming through, that the revenues and profits from AI are coming through,” Scott Wren, senior global market strategist at Wells Fargo Investment Institute in St Louis, Missouri, told Reuters this week.
Part of the AI economic boom is likely to come from cost savings. Microsoft announced at the start of the summer that it would cut about 9,000 jobs. Amazon is reported to be planning to cut as many as 30,000 corporate jobs, or 10% of workers in the white-collar division, to compensate for over-hiring during the peak demand of the pandemic.
With the application of AI-technologies, company managers are increasingly asked to justify hiring a human, with additional costs in health insurance and pension, along with HR and other management officials, when the role could be performed by AI. As a result, human resource divisions are likely to be the first to be scaled back as AI takes hold.
