by WorldTribune Staff, August 4, 2025 Real World News
With huge growth in its cloud-computing services and increasing demand for its artificial intelligence (AI) offerings, Microsoft has become the second $4 trillion company.
Just weeks after Nvidia became the first $4 trillion company, Microsoft crossed the milestone on Thursday morning.
"Throughout its five-decade history, Microsoft has been able to reinvent itself to maintain its grip on computing services and office software," Sebastian Herrera reported for the Wall Street Journal. "The company’s Windows operating system powers more than a billion active devices, the company has said, while its mix of gaming, hardware and enterprise tools has also made it omnipresent in tech users’ lives."
Microsoft announced on Wednesday that annual revenue from Azure, its biggest cloud-computing business, topped $75 billion, up 34% from its previous fiscal year. Amazon Web Services, its largest cloud rival, made $107.6 billion in 2024.
Azure's AI features are used by Meta Platforms, OpenAI and other companies. OpenAI in particular has spent heavily on Azure, and Microsoft indicated Wednesday that it expects to see continued demand for its AI services through the cloud.
“Cloud and AI is the driving force of business transformation across every industry and sector,” Chief Executive Satya Nadella said.
Microsoft, currently based in Redmond, Washington, was founded in 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
"Early on, Gates successfully negotiated licensing rights for Microsoft’s Disk Operating System, making it one of the most used operating systems of its time because it was bundled with IBM’s popular personal computers. It grew its dominance through Windows and survived an antitrust trial in the early 2000s," Herrera noted.
"In the 2010s, as companies looked to move their computing from local servers into the cloud, Microsoft invested heavily in cloud infrastructure, growing Azure into a rival of AWS. It also transitioned its office products into subscriptions and expanded through purchases such as software developer platform GitHub."
