After the company’s strong profits allayed concerns about a slowdown in cloud computing and increased confidence that artificial intelligence will become a significant growth engine, Microsoft Corp shares increased by around 7% on Wednesday, lifting tech stocks.
If present increases continue, the Redmond, Washington-based computer behemoth will surpass Saudi Aramco as the second-most valuable business in the world by adding approximately $160 billion to its market value. Its worth of $2.2 trillion is nearly $300 billion lower than that of Apple Inc.
Brent Braceli of Piper Sandler said the stock was a “AI-All Star” as at least 18 analysts boosted their price estimates for it. With better-than-expected growth in a number of business segments, including cloud computing and Office productivity software, Microsoft’s results astounded investors.
Microsoft’s findings are encouraging for an industry that recently let go tens of thousands of workers as demand declined due to the weakening economy.
Amazon.com Inc., Meta Platforms Inc., and Alphabet Inc. all saw gains of 1% to 3% in their respective stock prices.
Alphabet, the parent company of Google, also announced better-than-anticipated quarterly results, but its search engine only increased by 2% as opposed to Microsoft’s Bing, which saw a 10% gain thanks to the inclusion of ChatGPT’s technology.
In a 60-minute event, CEO Satya Nadella of the Windows manufacturer mentioned AI 50 times, underscoring its growing significance.
Nadella claimed that the business had more than 2,500 users of its Azure-OpenAI services, including companies like Mercedes-Benz and Coursera.
