The broader Wall Street has fully recovered from Donald Trump's April 2 tariff-threatening "Liberation Day". It is now back to the 5,700 mark in terms of the S&P 500 major barometer, which was last detected just before that great trade war act. However, some assets are reaching even higher February peaks already, being well ahead of the common recovery pace. Microsoft (MSFT) is certainly the biggest of the bright growth spots now.

Shares of Bill Gates' brainchild freshly reached nearly $440 last Friday, which was more than 11% up in intraday dynamics from just $395+ where it closed in April. High cloud demand makes the wind standing fair for Microsoft Azure business. Company's own forecast for its cloud profits are even higher than already achieved numbers. Price targets above $500 per unit look appropriate in this regard again.

The IT giant's revenue at its Azure cloud part actually added 33%, or even 35% in a constant currency calculation mode, in the last quarter ended March 31, even beating average estimates of a 29.7% rise. AI-related sales contributed nearly 16% to the growth, while it equalled 13% only three months before. Total quarterly revenue exceeded $70 billion for the first time in Microsoft's history, up more than $8 billion from less than $62 billion four quarters ago. The Intelligent Cloud unit, which houses Azure, contributed $26.8 billion, a 21% growth YoY. Productivity and Business Processes subdivision brought $29.9 billion (+10% YoY). Microsoft's total operating income increased 16% to $32 billion, while net income grew 18% to $25.8 billion. Earnings of $3.46 per share also broke the company's all-time record, while expert surveys were limited to expectations that it would remain at the levels marginally higher than $3.23 achieved in the last quarter of 2024 or maybe $3.3, which marked Q3 2024.

Commercial bookings on infrastructure and software contracts signed by customers grew as much as 18%, with a new Azure cloud contract with ChatGPT creator OpenAI as a main driving force, even though the particular sum of the latter is unknown and Microsoft officials declined to comment its size and role during the conference call to investors last week. Microsoft’s CFO Amy Hood only told investors that "the AI contribution" to the cloud computing business was "in line with the company’s expectations", while "the real outperformance in Azure this quarter was in our non-AI business". "The only real upside we saw on the AI side of the business was that we were able to deliver supply early to a number of customers," she added. Hood's puzzling behaviour just adjoined the crowd to buy more shares on hopes of more AI-related growth factors in the future.

Another reason was that some analysts recently lowered their expectations for Azure business as independent research reports showed ending some data centre lease obligations from Microsoft's side. It turned out that moderately lower estimates were not justified. CEO Satya Nadella said that Microsoft had a long history of constantly adjusting its data centre plans, but only in recent quarters had analysts started closely scrutinizing those moves. Beating estimates wouldn't have been this big if analysts didn't allow those underestimates before.

Microsoft now projects its cloud computing revenue growth of 34% to 35% on a constant currency basis for the current quarter, so that it may contribute between $28.75 billion and $29.05 billion to the overall sales figures. This inner forecast is also better than most optimistic estimates from the analyst pool at both Reuters and Bloomberg. Microsoft's market capitalization of nearly $3,25 trillion ranks first in the world, with Apple sliding down to less than $3.10 trillion on China-related supply cost worries and NVIDIA now at around $2.8 trillion even after its more than 25% bounce from April's lows.