Microsoft recently announced its financial earnings report for FY26 Q2, reporting $81.3 billion in revenue (up 17% YoY) and $38.3 billion in operating income (up 21% YoY). While impressive, investors have raised concerns about the software giant's spending on data centers and AI infrastructure.
Consequently, the company's shares fell about 6% in after-market trading after announcing its financials. Microsoft has spent $72.4 billion on capital expenditures so far, but CEO Satya Nadella insists that the company's spending on AI is actually paying off.
Nadella indicated that Copilot's daily user base has grown “nearly 3x year-over-year” during the earnings call, including AI chats, the news feed, search, browsing, shopping, and “integrations into the operating system.” (via TechCrunch).
For context, the company spent $88.2 billion on capital expenditures last year. The executive indicated that most of the capital has been channelled to serve AI to enterprises and major AI labs, including OpenAI and Anthropic.
As a result, investors remain hesitant to commit funds to Microsoft’s costly AI initiatives, voicing concerns that growth in Azure and Microsoft 365 applications has fallen short of expectations.“The fact that BOTH Azure and the M365 segments fell a bit short is the key negative we’re hearing,” Wall Street analyst for UBS, Karl Keirstead, added.
While generative AI has evolved from mere chatbots that can generate simple images and text based on prompts, multiple users have expressed their reluctance to adopt the technology, primarily due to privacy and security issues.
Last year, a damning report by The Information detailed that Microsoft's internal AI efforts were taking an unexpected turn with projected cuts and sales goals for its Azure AI products across the board.
The report further claimed that Microsoft's salespeople were struggling to meet goals, primarily due to the lack of demand for its AI products. While market share trends told a different story, Microsoft denied the claims.
Nadella has indicated that Microsoft's GitHub Copilot also saw significant growth and is now up 75% year-over-year with 4.7 million paid subscribers. Microsoft 365 Copilot enjoyed similar success with 15 million paid seats, acquired by companies for their employees, which represents a base of 450 million paid seats.
Microsoft 365 Copilot now has 15 million paid seats, acquired by companies for their employees. This represents a base of 450 million paid seats, the company stated.
To that end, Microsoft disclosed that OpenAI accounts for approximately 45% of the highlighted commitments, but its net income increased by $7.6 billion from its investment in OpenAI. As such, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella seems to think the company's vast spending on AI infrastructure and data centers is in order.
Is Microsoft’s Copilot AI really flying high? Share your thoughts in the comments and cast your vote!
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