Artificial intelligence is an expensive business, costing over 100 million dollars just to train a new model.
At Microsoft, however, a many billion dollars The investment in AI appears to be paying off: CEO Satya Nadella said in a quarterly earnings call on Wednesday that Microsoft's AI business “is on track to surpass a $10 billion annual revenue milestone next quarter” and become “the fastest business in our history to reach this milestone “.
of annual rate of return projects income for a period of time based on previous income.
Related: Will it take nuclear power to support AI? Microsoft is betting on it.
Microsoft has invested approx 14 billion dollars at OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. He has done some many billion dollars AI engagements, incl an agreement to reopen Three Mile Island, a nuclear power plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images
Nadella also noted on the call, which went over earnings for first quarter of fiscal year 2025that Microsoft Cloud revenue rose 22% year over year to $38.9 billion for the quarter ending September 30. Income in general rose 16% to $65.6 billion.
At Microsoft, “AI-driven transformation is changing work, work artifacts, and workflow in every role, function, and business process,” Nadella said.
Although Microsoft's earnings were better than expected, the company's stock fell by more than 5% on Thursday because projected cloud revenue growth was less than expected.
Related: These CEOs have the biggest pay packages in the US, according to a new report
Nadella was well compensated for leading Microsoft: He got a pay rise over $30 million for the fiscal year ending June 30, resulting in total payroll of $79.1 million compared to $48.5 million a year earlier.
Nadella's compensation would be $5.5 million morebut he asked for it to be lower after a series of cyber security breaches.
Meanwhile, Microsoft went through impactful layoffs about 1900 people in its gaming division in January.
Microsoft now has about 228,000 employees globally.