Azure crossed $100B in annual revenue with 43% growth, while Google Cloud surged 82%, leaving every other hyperscaler well behind. Microsoft generated $20B in free cash flow despite $36B in capex, while Alphabet went FCF-negative and suspended buybacks to fund AI buildout. Microsoft's $678B contracted backlog makes it the steadier compounder, while Alphabet carries 27% modeled upside for investors willing to absorb more risk.
It sounds nuts, but SoFi1 is giving new Active Invest users up to $3,000 in stock for a limited time, and all it takes is a $50 deposit to get started.2 See for yourself (Sponsor) Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) and Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOGL) both closed their latest quarters with cloud growth that dwarfed the rest of the hyperscaler field. Microsoft posted $90.01 billion in fiscal Q4 revenue, while Alphabet delivered $119.80 billion in its Q2. Both are pouring cash into AI infrastructure at a scale no rival can match, and their results just showed why the gap is widening.
Microsoft's Intelligent Cloud segment printed $39.31 billion, up 32%, with Azure growing 43% and crossing $100 billion in annual revenue for the first time. Satya Nadella framed the moment plainly: "We are advancing the frontier on the cost-to-outcome curve, ensuring every customer can turn tokens into business results." Copilot now sits at over 30 million paid seats, anchored by anchor deployments like NHS England (505,000 clinicians) and EY (400,000 employees). Alphabet's Google Cloud, meanwhile, accelerated to 82% growth on $24.77 billion.
Sundar Pichai noted nearly 90% of the Fortune 100 use Gemini Enterprise, while the Gemini App reached 950 million monthly active users. Off a smaller base, Google is compounding faster. SoFi Active Invest is offering a limited-time promotion.
Open an account, fund it with $50 or more, and you could receive up to $3,000 in complimentary stock for Active Invest accounts. See for yourself by clicking here now. The real separator is what happens under the capex avalanche.
Microsoft spent $35.80 billion on capex in Q4 and still generated $19.64 billion of free cash flow. Alphabet spent $44.92 billion and slipped to negative $5.86 billion FCF, raised roughly $70 billion in equity and debt, and suspended buybacks. Both firms lean on custom silicon (Microsoft's Maia and Alphabet's TPUs) to compress unit economics in a way peers reliant purely on third-party chips cannot easily match.
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