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Executive Chairman and CEO of Microsoft Corporation Satya Nadella speaks during the “Microsoft Build: AI Day” event in Bangkok, Thailand, May 1, 2024. 

Chalinee Thirasupa | Reuters

Microsoft on Wednesday updated quarterly revenue guidance for its three business segments in a shift that stands to give investors better visibility into the software maker’s growing cloud infrastructure business.

The company is bulking up the Productivity and Business Processes segment that includes Office productivity software subscriptions with services that have for years appeared inside the Intelligent Cloud unit that features Azure.

Productivity and Business Processes will also gain Windows commercial products and cloud services, a part of the More Personal Computing segment that includes volume licensing of the Windows operating system and cloud-based Windows tools.

Microsoft is removing the Power BI data analytics tool and the Enterprise Mobility and Security group of products from a closely watched year-over-year growth metric called Azure and other cloud services.

With those two moving out, the new Azure number “now more closely aligns to consumption business,” Microsoft said in an investor presentation summarizing the changes. Consumption reflects commercial clients actively using computing and storage services in Azure.

But Microsoft is adding revenue from its search and news advertising category — which until now was under More Personal Computing — into Azure and other cloud services.

The company said it expects 33% constant-currency revenue growth for Azure and other cloud services under the new definition for the fiscal first quarter, down 1 to 2 percentage points from the fiscal fourth quarter. In late July, based on the prior Azure definition, the company had called for growth of 28% to 29% at constant currency. Historically, consumption has driven growth in Azure and other cloud services, rather than the per-user tools, where growth in the number of seats has slowed.

“We got more visibility on Azure,” said Jason Ader, an William Blair analyst with the equivalent of a buy rating on Microsoft shares. He cited the removal of the per-user elements of Azure growth that Microsoft has included in the tally for years, making it more difficult to understand consumption.

Amazon discloses revenue for its market-leading Amazon Web Services division, but Microsoft’s financial reporting method for Azure has featured the per-user pieces, meaning that making comparisons is not straightforward.

Additionally, Microsoft said it will give Productivity and Business Processes some revenue stemming from its 2022 Nuance Communications acquisition that has appeared under Intelligent Cloud. And every quarter the company will disclose a combined growth rate for Windows and for devices, instead of communicating them separately, given that these are both PC-oriented.

A new metric called Microsoft 365 Commercial will appear inside the Productivity and Business Processes segment. It will include revenue from Office commercial products and cloud services, Power BI, Enterprise Mobility and Security and Windows commercial products and cloud services. The change comes “to align how the business is managed,” Microsoft said in the presentation.

But with so much going into Productivity and Business Processes, Ader said the company might be making it more difficult for investors to understand the health of core commercial subscriptions for Office productivity software. A slowdown in growth is a “minor concern” among investors, Ader said.

The More Personal Computing segment is picking up revenue from subscriptions to Copilot Pro, which brings generative artificial intelligence capabilities to Word, Excel and other applications for consumers. That revenue has shown up in Productivity and Business Processes since Copilot Pro’s introduction earlier this year.

As a result of the many adjustments, Microsoft now sees $27.75 billion to $28.05 billion in fiscal first-quarter revenue from the Productivity and Business Processes Segment, up from the range of $20.3 billion to $20.6 billion it provided in late July.

The forecast calls for Intelligent Cloud revenue between $23.80 billion and $24.10 billion, down from $28.6 billion to $28.9 billion. And it shows More Personal Computing revenue in the range of $12.25 billion to $12.65 billion, compared with $14.9 billion to $15.3 billion before.

But Microsoft continues to expect around $64.3 billion in revenue across the board. And it does not anticipate change to cost of revenue, operating expenses, other income and expense or tax rate.

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Amazon Kuiper second satellite launch postponed by ULA due to rocket booster issue

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Amazon Kuiper second satellite launch postponed by ULA due to rocket booster issue

A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket is shown on its launch pad carrying Amazon’s Project Kuiper internet network satellites as the vehicle is prepared for launch at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Florida, U.S., April 28, 2025.

Steve Nesius | Reuters

United Launch Alliance on Monday was forced to delay the second flight carrying a batch of Amazon‘s Project Kuiper internet satellites because of a problem with the rocket booster.

With roughly 30 minutes left in the countdown, ULA announced it was scrubbing the launch due to an issue with “an elevated purge temperature” within its Atlas V rocket’s booster engine. The company said it will provide a new launch date at a later point.

“Possible issue with a GN2 purge line that cannot be resolved inside the count,” ULA CEO Tory Bruno said in a post on Bluesky. “We will need to stand down for today. We’ll sort it and be back.”

The launch from Florida’s Space Coast had been set for last Friday, but was rescheduled to Monday at 1:25 p.m. ET due to inclement weather.

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Amazon in April successfully sent up 27 Kuiper internet satellites into low Earth orbit, a region of space that’s within 1,200 miles of the Earth’s surface. The second voyage will send “another 27 satellites into orbit, bringing our total constellation size to 54 satellites,” Amazon said in a blog post.

Kuiper is the latest entrant in the burgeoning satellite internet industry, which aims to beam high-speed internet to the ground from orbit. The industry is currently dominated by Elon Musk’s Space X, which operates Starlink. Other competitors include SoftBank-backed OneWeb and Viasat.

Amazon is targeting a constellation of more than 3,000 satellites. The company has to meet a Federal Communications Commission deadline to launch half of its total constellation, or 1,618 satellites, by July 2026.

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Google issues apology, incident report for hourslong cloud outage

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Google issues apology, incident report for hourslong cloud outage

Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, speaks at a cloud computing conference held by the company in 2019.

Michael Short | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Google apologized for a major outage that the company said was caused by multiple layers of flawed recent updates.

The company released an incident report late on Friday that explained hours of downtime on Thursday. More than 70 Google cloud services stopped working properly across the globe, knocking down or disrupting dozens of third-party services, including Cloudflare, OpenAI and Shopify. Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Google Meet and other first-party products also malfunctioned.

“We deeply apologize for the impact this outage has had,” Google wrote in the incident report. “Google Cloud customers and their users trust their businesses to Google, and we will do better. We apologize for the impact this has had not only on our customers’ businesses and their users but also on the trust of our systems. We are committed to making improvements to help avoid outages like this moving forward.”

Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google’s cloud unit, also posted about the outage in an X post on Thursday, saying “we regret the disruption this caused our customers.”

Google in May added a new feature to its “quota policy checks” for evaluating automated incoming requests, but the new feature wasn’t immediately tested in real-world situations, the company wrote in the incident report. As a result, the company’s systems didn’t know how to properly handle data from the new feature, which included blank entries. Those blank entries were then sent out to all Google Cloud data center regions, which prompted the crashes, the company wrote.

Engineers figured out the issue in 10 minutes, according to the company. However, the entire incident went on for seven hours after that, with the crash leading to an overload in some larger regions.

As it released the feature, Google did not use feature flags, an increasingly common industry practice that allows for slow implementation to minimize impact if problems occur. Feature flags would have caught the issue before the feature became widely available, Google said.

Going forward, Google will change its architecture so if one system fails, it can still operate without crashing, the company said. Google said it will also audit all systems and improve its communications “both automated and human, so our customers get the information they need asap to react to issues.” 

— CNBC’s Jordan Novet contributed to this report.

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AMD shares rise 9% after analysts say they expect a ‘snapback’ for chipmaker

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AMD shares rise 9% after analysts say they expect a 'snapback' for chipmaker

AMD CEO Lisa Su unveils the AMD vision for Advancing Al.

Courtesy: AMD

Shares of Advanced Micro Devices rose nearly 9% on Monday after analysts at Piper Sandler lifted their price target on the stock on optimism about the chipmaker’s latest product announcement.

The analysts said they see a snapback for AMD’s graphics processing units, or GPUs, in the fourth quarter. That’s when they expect the chipmaker to be through the bulk of the $800 million in charges that AMD said it would incur as a result of a new U.S. license requirement that applies to exports of semiconductors to China and other countries. 

Last week, AMD revealed its next-generation artificial intelligence chips, the Instinct MI400 series. Notably, the company unveiled a full-server rack called Helios that enables thousands of the chips to be tied together. That chip system is expected to be important for AI customers such as cloud companies and developers of large language models. 

AMD CEO Lisa Su showed the products on stage at an event in San Jose, California, alongside OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who said they sounded “totally crazy.”

“Overall, we are enthused with the product launches at the AMD event this week, specifically the Helios rack, which we think is pivotal for AMD Instinct growth,” the analysts wrote in their note. 

Piper Sandler raised its price target for AMD’s share price from $125 to $140.

The stock jumped past $126 on Monday to close at its highest level since Jan. 7, before President Donald Trump announced sweeping new tariffs and AMD warned of the chip control charges.

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