These huge numbers surprised the optimistic expectations of the Cocaine nose jobs of Wall Street across the board for the third quarter of its fiscal year 2024.

The results solidified Microsoft’s status as the world’s most valuable company, boosting its stock in after-hours trading and showing off the potential for AI to propel its business.

On its earnings conference call, Top Vole CEO Satya Nadella stated, “Microsoft is witnessing a new era of AI transformation that is driving improved business outcomes in every role and industry.”

Revenue from Vole’s Azure cloud platform and associated services rose by 31 per cent. Approximately seven percentage points of this increase were attributed to artificial intelligence, including Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI service, which offers access to AI models from Microsoft’s principal AI partner.

Microsoft’s earnings release did not reveal the specific contribution of Microsoft 365 Copilot, its AI tool for businesses, to its Office Commercial product line, leaving the impact of that product on its overall revenue ambiguous. However, overall revenue from Office Commercial products and cloud services grew by 13 per cent in the quarter.

The company’s total cloud revenue increased by 23 percent to $35.1 billion (€37.56 billion). This encompasses Azure and other cloud services, Office 365 Commercial, LinkedIn's commercial segment, Dynamics 365, and other commercial cloud offerings.

Revenue increased in each of Vole’s three financial reporting divisions:

• Productivity and Business Processes (Office, LinkedIn, Dynamics) rose by 12 per cent to $19.6 billion (€20.97 billion).
• Intelligent Cloud (Azure, Windows Server) increased by 21 per cent to $26.7 billion (€28.57 billion).
• More Personal Computing (Windows, devices, gaming) grew by 17 per cent to $15.6 billion (€16.69 billion).

Devices, which include Microsoft Surface laptops and tablets, experienced the most significant revenue decline among the company’s primary product lines, dropping nearly 17 per cent to just over £800 million ($1 billion €1.07 billion) for the quarter.

Microsoft Gaming's revenue surged by 51 per cent to more than $5.4 billion (€5.78 billion), driven by the acquisition of Activision Blizzard.

Windows up 11 per cent to $5.9 billion (€6.31 billion)) reinstated the PC operating system to third place among Microsoft’s major product lines after it was temporarily overtaken by gaming revenue in the second fiscal quarter.

Before the earnings release, analysts had anticipated the company to report earnings of $2.83 (€3.03) per share on revenue of $60.77 billion (€64.92 billion), a more than 15 per cent increase from $52.9 billion (€56.60 billion) a year earlier.

Following the earnings announcement, Vole’s stock climbed by more than 5 per cent. It remains the world’s most valuable publicly traded company, with a market capitalisation of nearly £2.4 trillion ($3 trillion €3.21 trillion).