The tech giant’s stock jumped 7 percent when markets opened Thursday morning, boosting the company’s market capitalization above $4 trillion for the first time.
However, it fell back below the threshold by market close, sitting around $3.96 trillion.
It joins Nvidia, which became the first company to cross the historic threshold earlier this month.
Microsoft’s stock is booming after reporting $76.4 billion in revenue for the three-month period between April and June, up 18 percent from the same time last year, and $27.2 billion in net income, up 24 percent year-over-year.
Most notably, the company’s cloud computing platform Azure surpassed $75 billion in revenue for the fiscal year, up 39 percent year-over-year in the last quarter.
Amy Hood, Microsoft’s chief financial officer, also announced during a Wednesday evening earning call that the company plans to spend $30 billion on capital spending in the next quarter.
“Cloud and AI is the driving force of business transformation across every industry and sector,” Satya Nadella, chair and CEO of Microsoft, said in a statement.
How policy will be impacting the tech sector now and in the future:
Bipartisan senators push for Trump to keep portions of Biden-era AI rule
Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) urged the Trump administration Thursday to maintain some parts of an artificial intelligence (AI) chip export framework laid out by former President Biden. In a letter to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the bipartisan duo called for the administration to keep provisions incentivizing companies to maintain most of their computing …
Scientists use AI to battle invasive species costing ranchers $35M
A team of researchers is using artificial intelligence in hopes of saving U.S. ranchers $35 million spent keeping an invasive plant in check. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and a conservation ranch in Montana have been training AI models to detect an invasive species even when there is limited data. Leafy spurge is a weed with small green flowers that can wreak havoc on the ecosystem. It is toxic to livestock …
UVALDE, Texas (KXAN) — Officials plan to use artificial intelligence (AI) to help Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District monitor its campus cameras in an effort to bolster security at schools. Three years after the mass shooting at Robb Elementary that left 19 students and two teachers dead, an AI gun detection company is giving the district its technology and services for free as part of a grant. Omnilert scans live …
News we’ve flagged from the intersection of tech and other topics:
China flags concerns over potential security risks in Nvidia’s H20 chips (Reuters)
Microsoft and Amazon are hurting cloud competition, U.K. regulator finds (CNBC)
Crypto Corner
Stablecoins have ‘no material impact’ on community banking, research finds
The growing adoption of stablecoins is unlikely to have a significant impact on community banking despite fears it could prompt major outflows, according to new research shared first with The Hill.
Stablecoins — cryptocurrencies tied to assets, like the U.S. dollar, to maintain a more stable price — are primed for expansion after President Trump signed the GENIUS Act into law earlier this month.
The bill, which created a regulatory framework for payment stablecoins, prompted concerns from community bankers.
In a letter to the Senate in May, the Independent Community Bankers of America (ICBA) warned that people could shift their money out of community banks and into stablecoins, in a move that “would create a cascade of issues.”
ICBA ultimately cheered several changes to the final legislation that reached Trump’s desk, including a prohibition on interest-bearing stablecoins and restrictions on the ability of nonfinancial public companies to issue the dollar-backed digital tokens.
However, new research from Charles River Associates, commissioned by Coinbase, found “no evidence of a material funding risk” from stablecoin adoption on community banking.
“The results reveal no statistically significant relationship between USDC adoption and community bank deposit outflows,” the report noted.
It pointed to several likely factors:
Community bank deposits and stablecoin demand could be driven by “unobservable common factors”
There may be limited overlap between community bank customers and stablecoin adopters
Shifts in returns on other types of assets could result in outflows from both bank deposits and stablecoins
“Even under an unlikely, model‑free assumption that every dollar invested in stablecoins reduces deposits one‑for‑one, the projected hit to community banks is modest: 6.8 percent in an extreme stablecoin adoption scenario and below one percent under our baseline adoption scenario,” the report said.
In a separate report using its own data, the Coinbase Institute similarly found that community bank customers do not significantly overlap with stablecoin adopters.
“We believe it is important to understand that stablecoins are not replacing traditional banking—they are enhancing it,” it wrote.
Crypto Corner is a daily feature focused on digital currency and its outlook in Washington.