Capacity limits: A Microsoft store in New York. The company's chief financial officer says data-centre capacity is slowing its continuing push into AI services. — Bloomberg
NEW YORK: Microsoft Corp shares dropped in late trading after the software maker forecast slower quarterly cloud revenue growth, reflecting the company’s struggle to bring data centres online fast enough to keep up with demand for artificial intelligence (AI) services.
Sales from the closely watched Azure cloud-computing business will rise 31% to 32% in the current period, Microsoft executives said Wednesday on a call following its first-quarter earnings report.
Azure revenue posted a 34% gain for that period, adjusted for currency fluctuations, which was a slight deceleration from the 35% growth a quarter earlier.
The dour outlook followed an otherwise upbeat report, during which the company said first-quarter revenue increased 16% to US$65.6bil and profit rose to US$3.30 a share – beating estimates.
But on a call with analysts, chief financial officer Amy Hood said some data-centre capacity Microsoft had been counting on for its push into AI didn’t materialise.
That will constrain revenue growth in the Azure business during the current quarter, which ends in December.
“We are in short supply, and so we remain focused on getting that into a more balanced position,” Hood said in an interview.
Microsoft shares reversed an earlier gain and fell about 4% in extended trading.
“Our fear is the more they throw into data-centre buildout, the more the drag is going to be on margins,” said Gil Luria, an analyst at D.A. Davidson & Co, who cut his rating on Microsoft shares to “neutral” during the September quarter.
“That isn’t happening yet. They’ve been able to cut enough costs elsewhere to still expand margins,” Luria said.
Chief executive officer Satya Nadella has overhauled the software maker’s product line with AI models from partner OpenAI.
He’s now seeking to recruit enough paying customers to the souped-up software and services to drive Microsoft’s growth for years to come.
At the same time, corporations are tapping the company’s data-centre capacity to power development of their own AI applications, buoying demand in its closely watched Azure business.
Like cloud rivals Google and Amazon.com Inc, Microsoft has ramped up spending to construct and rent the data centres required to fuel power-hungry AI services.
Microsoft even struck a deal recently to purchase nuclear power from a restarted reactor at Three Mile Island in an effort to ensure that it has sufficient electricity to meet its growing needs.
Quarterly capital expenditures in the first quarter, at US$14.9bil, were a record, up 50% from the same period a year earlier and exceeding analysts’ expectations.
Prior to 2020, Microsoft had never spent that much on property and equipment over the course of a full year.
In the second quarter, Microsoft’s line item for “other income and expense”, where it accounts for investments, will show a loss of about US$1.5bil, largely due to Microsoft’s share of the expected loss from OpenAI, chief financial officer Hood forecast on the call. Microsoft, which has put about US$13.75bil into the ChatGPT maker, is OpenAI’s largest shareholder.
Investors have been watching for signs that Microsoft’s hefty investments in AI are paying off, and the stock fell 3.7% during the September quarter, compared with a 5.5% increase in the Standard and Poor’s 500 Index.
The decline underscored Wall Street concerns that the company wasn’t yet realising sufficient gains from its AI investments, and risks falling behind as rivals pile into the market.
The Azure forecast on Wednesday revived those concerns, even as the company reported robust AI-related revenue gains and expressed optimism about further momentum for AI products.
Microsoft’s main sources of AI-related income fall into two categories – cloud services and AI-enhanced productivity assistants baked into Office, which help workers summarise emails, transcribe conference calls and create slideshows.
The company said 12 percentage points of Azure’s first-quarter growth was attributable to AI, compared with 11 points in the June quarter.
The company expects its AI business to be on track to bring in more than US$10bil in sales over the course of a year by sometime in the next quarter, Nadella said on the call.
Microsoft’s overall cloud revenue, a mix of sales from products such as Office and Azure cloud sales, rose 22% to US$38.9bil in the recent period.
Microsoft has been signing up corporate clients to use its AI-infused Office services, which carry a monthly list price of US$30 per user, in addition to the cost of the basic Office product.
Because of that expense, and because the products are still at an early stage of readiness, some clients have moved slowly with trials and deployments.
Still, the price increases are starting to benefit Microsoft.
Average revenue per user is ticking up, Hood said in the interview, owing both to the AI offering and a higher-priced version of the Office suite called E5.
Search ad revenue also posted better-than-expected growth of 19%, excluding the impact of currency, Hood said.
Microsoft has been baking AI into its Bing search service, and these improvements have boosted both user volume and the prices advertisers are willing to pay, she said. — Bloomberg
