Microsoft Corporation (MSFT) shares are moving lower Wednesday morning, even as fresh data points to the company's dominant position in both cloud computing and artificial intelligence. Sometimes the market just doesn't care about good news.
The Big AI Bet
Microsoft is on track to spend at least $500 million annually with Anthropic, the AI company behind the Claude language models. According to The Information, Microsoft ranks among Anthropic's largest customers and plans to integrate the technology across its product ecosystem. That's a hefty investment, but it signals how seriously Microsoft is taking the AI arms race.
Cloud Dominance Continues
A Morgan Stanley note released Wednesday morning highlighted some impressive survey results from chief information officers. The data confirms what many suspected: Microsoft remains the preferred public cloud vendor for enterprise tech leaders.
The survey of CIOs from the fourth quarter of 2025 revealed that companies expect their software spending to tick up from 3.7% growth in 2025 to 3.8% in 2026. Not exactly explosive growth, but steady momentum matters.
Analyst Keith Weiss noted that Microsoft stands out as the best positioned platform to capture those spending increases. Why? More than half of corporate application workloads are already running on Microsoft Azure, giving the company a structural advantage.
The AI adoption story looks equally promising. The survey marked the fifth consecutive quarter of increasing CIO adoption of Microsoft's M365 Copilot AI capabilities, with 80% planning to use M365 Copilot within the next twelve months.
"Microsoft remains [the] key generative AI winner benefitting from durable cloud transformation tailwinds," Weiss wrote.