Microsoft shares soar as company reports fastest cloud growth in four years

Microsoft just reminded everyone why it’s the most valuable company on the planet. The tech giant reported fiscal Q4 2026 results on July 29 showing Azure and cloud services revenue grew 43% year-over-year, the fastest quarterly pace the division has posted since early 2022. Wall Street was expecting around 40% growth. Microsoft casually beat that by three percentage points. Shares jumped more than 4% in after-hours trading, with some reports pegging the gains as high as 9.8%. The numbers behind the surge Full-year Microsoft Cloud revenue crossed the $100 billion threshold for the first time in fiscal 2026. CEO Satya Nadella put a specific number on the AI adoption story: paid subscriptions for Microsoft 365 Copilot have now exceeded 30 million. The company guided for 45% Azure revenue growth in fiscal Q1 2027 on a constant-currency basis. Analysts had been modeling roughly 41%. Microsoft acknowledged that capacity constraints remain a real issue and are expected to persist through at least the end of 2026. Why this matters beyond Redmond Azure has been quietly building out its blockchain-adjacent services for years. Enterprise clients using Azure for traditional cloud workloads ar...