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Microsoft is once again the world's most valuable company. On Thursday, the company added nearly $450 billion in market value, the largest single-day gain for a company. The tech giant’s shares witnessed a more than 15% jump, which lifted the company’s market capitalization to $3.35 trillion, surpassing NVIDIA’s one-day gain of $441 billion on April 9, 2025.
The biggest reason behind this surge is Microsoft’s AI push. For the last few years, the company has been investing heavily in its cloud infrastructure, Azure. The official reports have claimed that the cloud platform has witnessed stronger-than-expected growth.
Microsoft said its spending plans remain unchanged, as it expects capital expenditures of $50 billion for the fiscal first quarter of 2027 and $175 billion for the 2026 calendar year. The company expects Azure to grow 45% on a constant-currency basis.
Microsoft has spent billions of dollars on AI, cloud services, and new data centers. Many people wondered if those investments would take years to pay off. The latest earnings suggest the company is already seeing the benefits.
NVIDIA continues to lead the AI chip market, but Microsoft is using those chips to power cloud services that businesses use every day. This gives Microsoft another strong source of growth. As AI becomes more common, the race between Microsoft, NVIDIA, Google, and Amazon is likely to become even more competitive.
Also Read: Microsoft Confirms Copilot ‘Super App’ Launch this Year, Combining Chat, Coding, AI Agents
Direxion's head of capital markets, Jake Behan, has opined, “The key question was whether it could shift the conversation from how much it is spending on AI to what it is earning from those investments, and the results suggested meaningful progress.”
Microsoft's latest performance shows that AI is now helping the company grow in a real way. It is no longer only a long-term plan. The technology is already bringing in more customers and boosting the cloud business.
