Markets MSFT +3.02% AUG 01, 2026

Azure crosses $100B, Meta free cash flow craters to $784M as AI capex trade splits Big Tech

Microsoft added nearly $450B in market cap on its best day since 2008 while Meta sank ~9% on a $784M free cash flow print and $130B–$145B capex guide.

BY HENLEY MARRAST · MARKETS DESK

Microsoft added nearly $450 billion in market capitalization on Thursday, its stock climbing 15% for the best single-day performance since 2008, while Meta Platforms fell more than 9% on the same tape. The gap wasn’t about growth. It was about who has already shown the return on their AI capex, and who’s still asking investors to trust the arc.

Microsoft’s fiscal Q4 revenue landed at $90.01 billion against an LSEG consensus of $87.62 billion, with Azure growing 43% at constant currency versus a StreetAccount estimate of 40.2%. Azure revenue crossed $100 billion in fiscal 2026, the first Big Tech cloud platform to clear that mark in a single fiscal year. CFO Amy Hood reported Microsoft Cloud revenue of $59.3 billion, up 27%. Microsoft 365 Copilot now sits at over 30 million paid seats, up from more than 20 million in April. Fiscal-year EPS came in at $17.95, buoyed by a $3.2 billion gain on the Anthropic stake and roughly $5 billion on OpenAI.

That’s the setup for Tracy Woo, principal analyst at Forrester, to say Microsoft’s $190 billion data-center buildout “is beginning to deliver returns.”

Meta’s print told the mirror-image story. Revenue of $60.80 billion grew 28%, ad impressions rose 14%, and price-per-ad climbed 12%. Then the capex line. Q2 spending hit $31.1 billion against $17.0 billion a year earlier, total expenses of $42.0 billion grew 55%, and full-year guidance was set at $130 billion to $145 billion. Diluted EPS of $6.18 came in roughly a dollar below the $7.17–$7.22 analyst range. Free cash flow collapsed to $784 million from $8.55 billion. Bloomberg reported Meta has now committed almost $700 billion in future spending tied to AI data centers, cloud, and related agreements with AWS, Google Cloud, and others. Days earlier, Alphabet posted its first cash-flow-negative quarter.

Q3 revenue guidance of $61 billion to $64 billion brackets the $63.15 billion analyst estimate, which isn’t what a market pricing $145 billion of capex wants to see.

The split isn’t AI skepticism. It’s the market beginning to sort AI maximalists into two buckets: platforms already monetizing inference, and platforms still building the warehouses.

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.