In the context of a frantic race for AI and computing power, it goes without saying that these results were eagerly awaited by all market observers. After all, the Redmond-based group accounts for 5% of the S&P 500 and nearly 8% of the NASDAQ on its own.

The good news is that it does not disappoint. Over the first nine months of the year, revenue reached $242bn, up 18% y-o-y - a significant feat considering the group's already huge scale. The same satisfaction applies to operating income, which grew by 21% over the period.

The two strategic segments - Productivity and Business Processes, and Intelligent Cloud - both show robust health, with the latter marking a return to favor, while the More Personal Computing segment, which represents only 10% of the consolidated total, shows revenue that is flat to the dollar. It nevertheless improved its margins, despite a highly inflationary environment, particularly regarding memory prices, which is no mean feat.

Naturally, all eyes are on capex. The acceleration here is very pronounced: capital investments jumped by 68%, nearly double the growth of operating cash flow. This does not prevent Microsoft from maintaining full latitude to reward its shareholders, with $36bn returned over nine months, compared woth $30bn a year earlier.

Yet this is only the seed phase: for the 2026 calendar year, Microsoft plans to invest $190bn - at least twice as much as last year, and more than the free cash flow it generated in FY 2025. Among the four "hyperscalers" - Google, Amazon, MICROSOFT and Meta - the group led by Satya Nadella thus ranks third in terms of spending.

Microsoft, which has successfully navigated every major technological revolution over the past forty years and is approaching the AI era through a strengthened partnership with OpenAI, unsurprisingly maintains a resolutely confident stance regarding the upcoming reshuffling of the pack.

The emergence of the cloud fifteen years ago was a formidable accelerator for the group - something many investors initially struggled to believe - and the Redmond group asserts that AI is already more accretive to its margins than the cloud was in its early years.

Investors are greeting this narrative with a certain degree of caution, as evidenced by the recent contraction in the group's valuation multiples, which nevertheless remain in quite reasonable territory.