Microsoft (MS) has reached the pinnacle of the tech industry. On the 31st (local time) in the New York stock market, MS shares surged by 8.2% during trading to reach $555.45 per share, breaking through the $4.1 trillion market cap for the first time. This makes MS the second company in the world to join the $4 trillion market club, following Nvidia. However, the value later decreased, and as of 9:30 AM Korean time, it stood at $3.97 trillion.
It took 50 years for MS to surpass a $4 trillion market cap since its founding by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1975. MS had surpassed the $3 trillion mark in January last year and increased its market cap by another trillion dollars in a year and a half.
This sharp rise was due to MS’s second-quarter earnings exceeding market expectations. MS reported total revenue of $76.4 billion, an 18% increase over the same period last year, while its core Azure cloud computing segment grew by 39%, surpassing market expectations of 34%. The cloud and AI infrastructure business drove their performance.
Starting this quarter, MS has formalized its transition to becoming the “operating system of the AI era.” MS CFO Amy Hood stated after the earnings release that “capital expenditure for Q1 of the fiscal year (July-September) is expected to exceed $30 billion,” and that “we are continuing to increase cloud infrastructure investments to meet AI demand.” Azure’s growth rate for the next quarter is also projected to reach 37%.
Another highlight of the earnings release was Meta. Benefiting from expanded AI investments and improved advertising revenue, Meta’s stock price surged nearly 13%, with a market cap increase of $223 billion in a single day, marking the largest single-day increase in history. Together, MS and Meta added over $400 billion in corporate value in one day, reaffirming their presence in the AI market.