Microsoft will report its fiscal 2026 third-quarter results on April 29, and investors will get a fresh read on whether the company can keep its AI business moving fast enough to justify a share price that is now 22% below its record high.
The company enters that report with two numbers that matter most. Businesses had bought 15 million Copilot for 365 licenses as of Dec. 31, a 3.7% penetration rate across the more than 400 million 365 licenses already paid for by companies around the world. That makes Copilot a real product with real revenue, but still a small slice of Microsoft’s huge corporate base. The tally was up 160% year over year, showing momentum even if adoption remains limited.
Microsoft’s broader AI push is being measured just as closely. The company spent $118 billion over the past four quarters to build data centers, and Azure revenue grew at least 39% year over year in each of the first two quarters of fiscal 2026. As of Dec. 31, Microsoft also had a $625 billion order backlog from customers, with 45%, or $281 billion, tied to OpenAI alone.
That backlog is where the story gets less tidy. In February, OpenAI said it will spend only $600 billion on computing capacity through 2030 across all providers, down from a previous forecast of $1.4 trillion. The source says Microsoft’s order backlog might be overstated because of OpenAI’s revised spending plans, a reminder that the biggest number on the page may not be the cleanest one.
Microsoft’s AI products and services include the Copilot virtual assistant and the Azure cloud platform, and the company can already offer Copilot for free in Windows, Bing and the Edge browser. But enterprise customers still have to pay extra to add Copilot to the 365 productivity suite, and that is where Microsoft has been trying to turn usage into durable sales. The obstacle is speed. Azure could be growing even faster, but Microsoft cannot build data centers quickly enough to meet demand. April 29 should show whether the stock’s pullback has gone too far, or whether the market is still waiting for proof that the AI spend is turning into growth at the pace investors were promised.
