Wall Street rises sharply, driven by soaring Microsoft stock

Microsoft just reminded everyone why it’s in the conversation for most valuable company on the planet. After posting fiscal Q4 results that cleared the bar by a wide margin, shares jumped more than 15% on July 30, dragging the broader market higher with them and rewriting the record books in the process. The single-day gain added roughly $450 billion to Microsoft’s market capitalization. It’s the largest one-day market cap increase for any U.S. corporation in history, and it happened because a cloud business kept doing what clouds apparently do best: rain money. The numbers that moved markets Total revenue for the quarter came in at $90 billion, up 18% from the same period last year. Net income climbed 31% to $35.8 billion. The star of the show was the Intelligent Cloud segment. Azure and other cloud services posted 43% year-over-year growth, pushing the segment past $100 billion in annual revenue for the first time. The earnings report didn’t just beat estimates. It changed the narrative. Heavy AI investment, the market now appears to believe, can pay off faster than feared. Copilot finds its footing in the enterprise Beyond the headline numbers, one figure stood out for its strat...