Markets MSFT +15.51% JUL 30, 2026

Azure tops $100B, MSFT jumps 8.5% as Meta free cash flow collapses to $784M

Microsoft's Q4 print — $90B revenue, Azure +43%, 30M Copilot seats — split the mag-7 tape from Meta's EPS miss and 9% drop on the same evening.

BY HENLEY MARRAST · MARKETS DESK

Microsoft crossed the $100 billion Azure annual-revenue line for the first time on Wednesday evening, and the tape did what the tape does when a mag-7 name delivers a clean beat inside an AI capex cycle: shares jumped roughly 8.5% after hours while Meta, reporting into the same window, dropped more than 9% on an EPS miss. By Thursday’s close the S&P 500 IT sector had added nearly 5%, its biggest one-day gain since mid-2025.

The Microsoft print itself was the kind analysts had been modeling toward but hadn’t dared to fully price. Fiscal Q4 revenue landed at $90.0 billion, up 18% year over year. Microsoft Cloud came in at $59.3 billion, up 27%. Azure and other cloud services grew 43%, which Bloomberg flagged as the fastest cloud growth in four years and well ahead of the ~40% Street consensus. GAAP net income hit $35.8 billion, diluted EPS of $4.81 against a $4.24 estimate, with 33 cents of that attributable to a $3.2 billion gain on Microsoft’s Anthropic stake.

Satya Nadella disclosed “over 30 million paid seats” on Microsoft 365 Copilot. Commercial remaining performance obligations grew 84% to $678 billion, a backlog number that reframes the capex debate.

Which is the actual story. Capital expenditures and finance leases hit $41 billion in the quarter, up 69% year over year. CFO Amy Hood told analysts Microsoft cut its calendar-2026 capex forecast to roughly $175 billion from around $190 billion, and simultaneously extended the assumed useful life of office and data-center properties to 25 years from 15. Roughly two-thirds of the spend, the company noted, still goes to short-lived CPUs and GPUs.

Meta reported into the same evening and drew the opposite reaction. EPS of $6.18 missed the $7.22 consensus by $1.04. Revenue was $60.80 billion. Q3 guidance of $61–64 billion straddled the $63.15 billion Street number without clearing it. A day earlier Mark Zuckerberg had announced a $14 billion El Paso data-center venture with BlackRock, telling analysts Meta was contracting “for compute at a significant premium over what we paid for it.”

Two hyperscalers, one evening, one capex cycle. The market priced the backlog and punished the premium.

Sources

About the author

Henley Marrast

MARKETS DESK

Henley Marrast covers AI-equity flow, accelerator demand, and earnings prints for AI Sheet Report. She leads coverage of the public AI complex from the New York markets desk, with a focus on the daily tape and quarterly results. She has been writing about technology markets for several years.