Microsoft After Earnings: Is Copilot Finally Paying Off? Azure AI Revenue, Office Monetization and the Cloud‑Margin Tradeoff
Microsoft opened its fiscal year with a clean beat on revenue and earnings, powered by 40% year-over-year growth at Azure and accelerating demand for AI services. Yet shares slipped in extended trading as management guided to a faster capital expenditure ramp to keep pace with capacity‑constrained AI infrastructure. The market’s verdict underscores a central question for the stock: Is Copilot’s monetization—and Azure’s AI wave—translating into durable, high‑return growth strong enough to offset near‑term margin pressure? The early evidence is compelling. Microsoft’s fiscal Q1 revenue rose to about $77.7 billion, with Intelligent Cloud up 28% and Azure outpacing peers. Meanwhile, Microsoft 365 revenue per user improved, helped by Copilot and E5 mix, and the Copilot family surpassed 150 million monthly active users. Commercial bookings more than doubled, and the company’s backlog swelled to $392 billion with roughly a two‑year weighted duration. But meeting demand requires scale—and capital. Capex jumped to $34.9 billion in Q1, about half of which went to short‑lived GPUs and CPUs, and the company now expects the FY2026 capex growth rate to exceed FY2025.