Microsoft‘s latest quarterly results, released this week, showed revenue of $81.3 billion, up 17 percent from the same period last year, with operating income of $38.3 billion. Non-GAAP diluted earnings per share came in at $4.14, beating the $3.85 analysts had forecast.
Despite the beat, Microsoft shares fell roughly 6.8 percent following the announcement. Part of the reported net income gain came from Microsoft’s investment stake in OpenAI, which added about $7.6 billion to net income and roughly $1.02 to diluted earnings per share, a factor some investors said made the underlying cloud and spending picture harder to read. Results also included a separate $3.2 billion gain tied to Microsoft’s stake in Anthropic, which added another 33 cents to earnings per share.
Microsoft Cloud revenue surpassed $50 billion in a single quarter for the first time. Within that, the Intelligent Cloud segment brought in $32.9 billion, up 29 percent, with Azure and other cloud services revenue growing 39 percent, a slight step down from 40 percent growth in the prior quarter. Capital expenditure hit $37.5 billion for the quarter, up 66 percent from a year earlier, putting the company on an annualized infrastructure spending run rate approaching $100 billion.
Microsoft’s commercial remaining performance obligation, a measure of contracted future revenue, climbed to $625 billion, up 110 percent year over year, with a weighted average duration of about two and a half years. Roughly 45 percent of that backlog is tied to OpenAI alone, underscoring how central the AI partnership has become to Microsoft’s long-term revenue commitments even as it complicates near-term profit comparisons.
The drop reflects a broader pattern this earnings season, in which strong headline numbers from major technology companies have been overshadowed by investor concern over the scale of ongoing AI infrastructure spending and its effect on margins. The decline was smaller than the roughly 11 percent slide in Meta Platforms shares after its own results the same week, as investors across the sector weighed similar concerns about rising AI infrastructure spending against otherwise solid revenue growth.
