Microsoft will report its fiscal 2026 third-quarter results on April 29, and the numbers are landing at a moment when the company’s stock is still 22% below its record high. The report will cover a quarter that ended March 31, giving investors a fresh look at whether demand for cloud computing and artificial intelligence is keeping pace with Microsoft’s spending.
One figure will matter most: as of Dec. 31, businesses had bought 15 million Copilot for 365 licenses, a 3.7% penetration rate across more than 400 million paid 365 seats. The company has made Copilot available for free in Windows, Bing and Edge, but enterprise customers must pay extra to add it to the 365 productivity suite. That leaves Microsoft with a product that is visible everywhere and still lightly used where it can charge the most.
Azure is the other test. Revenue for the cloud unit grew at least 39% year over year in each of the first two quarters of fiscal 2026, while Microsoft spent $118 billion over the past four quarters building data centers to keep up with demand. As of Dec. 31, it also had a $625 billion order backlog from customers waiting for more infrastructure to come online, suggesting demand is running ahead of supply.
That backlog is where the story gets complicated. Forty-five percent of it, or $281 billion, was tied to OpenAI, even after OpenAI said in February that it will spend only $600 billion on computing capacity through 2030 across all providers. The gap does not erase Microsoft’s cloud advantage, but it does raise the question of how much of the current buildout is being driven by one customer and how quickly that appetite can be absorbed.
For investors watching msft stock, the earnings report is less about one quarter than about whether Microsoft can turn its infrastructure spending into durable revenue. If Copilot stays a niche add-on and Azure growth eventually cools as capacity catches up, the market will have to decide whether the company’s biggest investments are still running ahead of the payoff.
