Two weeks ago, Microsoft topped Apple as the most valuable public company. Last week, it surpassed $3 trillion in market valuation. Next week, Satya Nadella will hit his 10th anniversary as the company’s chief executive.
For Microsoft, the pressure to keep delivering is on.
In particular, investors are looking for the company to cash in on what they see as its lead in artificial intelligence. It has invested billions of dollars in OpenAI, the start-up behind the ChatGPT chatbot, and spent last year racing to push its A.I. systems into every product it offers. Microsoft has told investors that A.I. will not start producing meaningful results until this year, but investors have looked for early signs of how much the hype will turn into sales.
On Tuesday, Microsoft gave signs that it is finding a path, as it posted revenue and profits that beat Wall Street expectations.
Revenue was $62 billion in the three months that ended in December, up 18 percent from a year earlier. Profit hit $21.9 billion, up 33 percent.
“We’ve moved from talking about A.I. to applying A.I. at scale,” Mr. Nadella said in a statement.
The company said it expected between $60 billion and $61 billion in sales in the current quarter, up 13 to 15 percent from a year ago, and higher operating income in the fiscal year even as it invested in building more data centers for cloud computing and A.I.
In the just-ended quarter, Microsoft’s commercial cloud offerings broadly brought in $33.7 billion, up 24 percent.
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