Microsoft lost $ 200 billion of capitalization, not hijacked for the demand for cloud services

The market value of Microsoft collapsed by $ 200 billion after the publication of its quarterly report: the cloud unit of the company showed a more modest growth, which was predicted by Wall Street analysts. The software giant failed to cope with too high demand for services related to artificial intelligence.

Microsoft managed to surpass the expectations of analysts for revenue and net profit based on the results of the past quarter, but its cloud unit, which includes the Azure platform and makes the company’s largest contribution, did not meet the expectations a little. In the annual calculation of Azure revenue from AI services, it increased by 157 %, but the financial director of Microsoft Amy Hood admitted that the problem of lack of capacities will remain in 2025, although the company is working on its solution. By the end of the financial year, the problem will not be so acute, the leader promised.

The revenue of the entire cloud unit of Microsoft increased by 21 % and reached $ 40.9 billion, not justifying the expectations of analysts, which predicted $ 41.1 billion. Because of this share, the companies the day before lost more than 6 % of the price. The income of all Microsoft, compared with the previous year, increased by 12 % and amounted to $ 69.6 billion; Net profit increased by 10 % to $ 24.1 billion – analysts expected $ 23.5 billion. The company’s capital costs in the last quarter amounted to $ 22.6 billion, and this is twice as much as a year earlier. In the current financial year (ending on June 30, 2025), Microsoft will spend about $ 80 billion – the funds will go to create an infrastructure of data centers necessary for teaching AI models and application deployment.

The company plans record expenses while Chinese Deepseek demonstrates the results comparable to the technical indicators of Openai projects, but for much more modest money. The Microsoft CEO called the decision of the Chinese laboratory “real innovations”, promised that these solutions would work in the interests of customers, and recalled that, as the cost of cloud resources, demand for them was increasing. The software giant secured a place in the club of selected companies with a market capitalization above $ 3 trillion due to AI technologies, primarily developed by his partner Openai – large language models of the company are available in Azure. Last week, Microsoft stated that she was ready to change the nature of interaction with Openai and allow the developer to use the computing resources of competitors. In the past quarter, the commercial demand for Microsoft services, mainly related to OpenAi products, increased by 67 %.