Jigar Shah
Clean-Energy Entrepreneur, Founder of SunEdison, Co-Founder of Generate Capital
Microsoft is the most exposed big tech company in the AI spending wave, and an AI writedown would land on it first. It had a genuine moat that needed almost no capital, but pledged $80B in data center spending, canceled Claude Code licenses because token costs were untenable, and tied its destiny to OpenAI, which it does not control. x.comÂ
AI's threat to incumbent tech makes SpaceX the preferred investment for the next decade. AI has begun taking business from Google, with Amazon and Apple next; Microsoft's 27% workforce reduction program signals desperation. x.comÂ
Microsoft's $13 billion OpenAI investment may be impaired, because OpenAI's CFO Sarah Friar has worried, per Bloomberg, that the company might not be able to pay for future compute contracts if revenue does not grow fast enough. OpenAI, valued at $852 billion, has no real profit and burns through GPUs and investor cash. That would accelerate Microsoft's already sizable decline this year. x.comÂ
Microsoft's OpenAI exposure is a very good reason to keep it alongside Anthropic exposure through Alphabet and Amazon. The prior thought of reducing or exiting Microsoft has given way to a tentative hold, with no plans to add for now. x.comÂ
Microsoft's Azure has lost its OpenAI-model access edge because those models are also on AWS and are coming to Google Cloud. Azure now has to win on price and service rather than access. x.comÂ
Microsoft is getting outworked as an infrastructure company. Its 40% Azure growth came entirely from OpenAI, which now runs on other clouds, while Anthropic runs on Google and Amazon. Amazon has Trainium, which Anthropic uses heavily, and Google has TPUs; Microsoft has no equivalent. Agentic software making Office less useful is a smaller part of the bear case. x.comÂ
Microsoft's AI spending is producing faster growth with better economics: Azure accelerated to 48% on a $100B+ base while capex was $39.4B, below expectations. Management then guided Azure to 49-50% and said demand still exceeds supply, ending the debate over whether AI investment is paying off. Overweight, $625 target. x.com x.com x.comÂ
Microsoft's outlook may be more perilous than the consensus recognizes, because few commentators understand how much of its revenue depends on OpenAI. As @GaryMarcus notes, OpenAI, Microsoft's biggest customer by far, is burning billions a month with no obvious way to meet its future obligations, even as the market rallies on optimism about Microsoft's revenue. x.com x.comÂ
Microsoft faces AI disruption that could erode its software moat and compress its high multiple. Chris Hohn, the best stock picker ever and not one to move lightly, cut Microsoft from 10% to 1% of his portfolio, about $8 billion, citing AI disruption. The question that matters is whether a business can be disrupted: when code becomes a commodity the moat erodes, and multiple compression from a high base does severe damage. x.comÂ
Microsoft's hold on enterprise software and the cloud running AI makes it one of tech's best positions to own. Fiscal Q1 revenue rose 19% on Azure and the AI stack, while operating income rose 21% and net income 32%. Grade: A. x.comÂ
AI hyperscalers' heavy bond issuance can crowd out the corporate AI spending they depend on. After hyperscalers flooded the bond market all summer, a company rolling its Covid-era debt 5% higher has less left for an AI budget. And if every valuation and megatech management guide rests on commitments from Anthropic and OpenAI, they rest on unaudited financials never reported to the SEC. x.com x.comÂ
