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Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella (Jason Redmond/Getty Images)

Microsoft joins the $4 trillion club, plans to spend over $30 billion on capex this quarter

Microsoft’s blowout FY25 Q4 earnings powered a surge in shares making it the second $4 trillion company, joining an elite club shared only by Nvidia.

Microsoft had a blowout fiscal fourth quarter, beating estimates for earnings and revenue. In premarket trading, shares surged over 8%, pushing the valuation above $4 trillion, an elite club only shared with Nvidia.

On the earnings call last night, CEO Satya Nadella summed up the company’s impressive fiscal year performance:

“It was a very strong close to what was a record fiscal year for us. All up, Microsoft Cloud surpassed $168 billion in annual revenue, up 23%. The rate of innovation and the speed of diffusion is unlike anything we’ve seen.”

Like Nvidia, Microsoft’s surging valuation is powered by white-hot demand for AI computing. The legacy tech giant has nimbly positioned itself for success in a fast-moving, young AI industry:

  • 🤝 It has a big (if strained) partnership with market leader OpenAI.

  • ☁️ Most importantly, Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform and massive data centers (over 400 of them) are AI-model-agnostic — they will sell computing for pretty much any company and any AI model or application.

Indeed, Azure’s performance was a big driver of growth for the quarter, with Azure (and other cloud services) revenue growth increasing 39% year on year.

For the first time, the company revealed how much money Azure has made: more than $75 billion in annual revenue.

That number could have been even higher if supply weren’t an issue.

“While we brought additional data center capacity online this quarter, demand remains higher than supply,” CFO Amy Hood said.

The demand is so high for Microsoft’s cloud computing services that it has a significant contracted backlog — $368 billion worth.

To catch up with that demand, Hood said on the earnings call last night that the company continues to spend huge on capex: “We expect Q1 capital expenditures to be over $30 billion driven by the continued strong demand signals we see.”

But Hood cautioned that the capex seen in FY25 might not be the norm:

“Capital expenditure growth, as we shared last quarter, will moderate compared to FY25 with a greater mix of short-lived assets. Due to the timing of delivery of additional capacity in H1, including large finance lease sites, we expect growth rates in H1 will be higher than in H2.”

Update (10:23 a.m. ET): a previous version of this piece attributed Google’s AI model to Microsoft.

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Luke Kawa

Opendoor surges on bullish options bets as traders look to potential real estate tokenization

Opendoor Technologies is surging on Friday amid bullish options bets and social media posts referencing unconfirmed rumors about the company.

The stock moved higher in the premarket session after the soft inflation report boosted stocks and briefly pushed long-term bond yields lower (positive for a real estate company). But the real gains came after the opening bell rang and options demand picked up.

As of 12:11 p.m. ET, roughly 664,000 call options have changed hands versus a 10-day average of about 364,000 for a full session.

What seems to be galvanizing members of the “$OPEN Army” is the potential for the company to pursue the tokenization of real-world assets, with Robinhood often bandied about as a potential partner in this endeavor.

(Robinhood Markets Inc. is the parent company of Sherwood Media, an independently operated media company subject to certain legal and regulatory restrictions.)

Opendoor bulls have often pointed to signs that Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev appears to be fond of the company, from what appeared on-screen during a demo of a social trading feature at HOOD’s conference in Las Vegas in September to offering support to Opendoor CEO Kaz Nejatian in setting up an opportunity for retail shareholders to ask questions during the online real estate company’s next earnings call.

Opendoor is currently in a quiet period ahead of earnings, which restricts what type of announcements a company can make.

The call options seeing the most demand expire this Friday with strike prices of $8, $8.50, and $9.

Intel Earnings Researchers

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Luke Kawa

Beyond Meat gains amid slightly better-than-expected Q3 sales, positive commentary on legal issues

Shares of Beyond Meat built on their premarket gains after the plant-based meat seller reported preliminary Q3 sales a bit ahead of Wall Street’s expectations, before paring this advance after the market opened.

For the three months ended September 27, management said net revenue would be approximately $70 million. That’s in line with their guidance range of $68 million to $73 million, but Wall Street was expecting sales to skew toward the lower end of that range, at $68.7 million.

However, its anticipated gross margin of 10% to 11% is lower than analysts had been expecting (13.8%). That’s still the case even adjusting for expenses related to its downsizing of operations in China, which would have left margins around 12% to 13%, per Beyond.

Perhaps more importantly, the company provided positive commentary regarding arbitration discussions with a former co-manufacturer that appear to bring it closer to a resolution while limiting potential damages:

“As previously disclosed, in March 2024, a former co-manufacturer brought an action against the Company in a confidential arbitration proceeding claiming that the Company inappropriately terminated its agreement with the co-manufacturer and claimed damages of at least $73.0 million. On September 15, 2025, the arbitrator issued an interim award (the ‘Interim Award’) and found that the Company had a valid basis to terminate the agreement with the Manufacturer. The details of the Interim Award are confidential, and a final arbitration award has not been issued. Additional proceedings will be held to determine the award of attorneys’ fees, prejudgment interest and costs, if any, before a final arbitration award will be issued. On September 25, 2025, the Manufacturer filed a request with the arbitrator to re-open the arbitration hearing. On September 29, 2025, the Company opposed this request. On October 20, 2025, the arbitrator denied the Manufacturer’s request.”

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