The Motley Fool on $MSFT (Oct 28, 2026)

Although later today we do have Alphabet and Microsoft report. But yeah, for for the AI story, I would say Microsoft and Google are are the big stories later later today.

it impacts the companies that are going to report tonight, Google and Microsoft, two of the the biggest counterparties for anthropic. hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue already contracted to I believe both of them when you add them together.

Microsoft Azure is always the one where I'm like, are they playing it smart or or what? Because their number is much more. It's only at 40. It's almost $45 billion, which is still big, but small compared to all the rest.

And we have seen Microsoft be not that big of a of a player in this whole AI financing game, right? They they they tried to walk away a bit from OpenAI. They opened up Azure to others.

They don't really want to finance that that many players. It's it's quite interesting playbook, which is also probably why they will be the only one still generating free cash flow um over the over the next couple of quarters.

All right, final one. Let's touch on Microsoft. Uh I pulled up the wrong thing here. Uh Microsoft reports after the market close closes today. Uh what sort of things are we looking for?

I'll just pop up the the revenue estimates and earnings estimates uh like I did with uh with Google, but we're looking for, you know, a year ago 76 uh.4 billion worth or sorry, that's the wrong quarter. 77 uh.7 billion worth of revenue.

Now they're looking for the market is looking for about $90.7 billion worth of revenue. So just like we see with Alphabet, a big jump there. earnings per share a bigger I would say a bigger jump expected here uh from 413 to 472 is what's the current bar that the market is looking for but what sort of uh what sort of metrics are you looking at with Microsoft

I think with Microsoft the only thing people look at is Azure that's the only I think that's literally the only metric that that the market cares is Azure the growth there I think there was two quarters maybe three quarters ago where the growth in Azure missed by just 1% like it was 38 should have been 39 or or whatever and the market freaked out stock dropped it's still 38% growth year over year on a much larger business as well so it's yeah it's just going to be Azure growth capex wise I think micro again Microsoft is like the the boring very profitable player in this whole AI uh AI buildouts

you want to talk about a crappy product company this is this is probably the worst with cop co-pilot with copilot but and yet you will hear the numbers for copilot are going to go up and that's purely because enterprises are forced to use copilot over anything else so

um so yeah there is that but I did hear that people think people use copilot a lot more in Excel and it's been doing quite a good job which

yeah that makes sense I would be very surprised and disappointed if that was not the case if copilot could not work well in Excel which I think was the case at first because I cloud was available first in Excel before Copilot also

quite strange from Microsoft but okay I think again it's it's again one of the one of the better businesses out there it's not maybe not as exciting as the others but it's going to generate tens of billions of dollars in free cash flow every year's going to grow fast they're going to tell us we're growing as fast as possible so