AI: Is Microsoft's growth keeping up with investor expectations?

2026년 2월 17일 · Unknown · financial · 출처 Yahoo Finance

Jefferies senior analyst Brent Thill takes a closer look at Microsoft's (MSFT) path for growth as it continues to be a key player in the AI race and how investors seem to be reacting, expecting an inflection point to materialize in the tech stock.

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Video Transcript

00:00 Speaker A

I want to end here uh on on a name, Brent, you know very well and that you like in the megacaps.

00:05 Speaker A

You like Microsoft. The stock's down about 16% already this year.

00:10 Speaker A

CEO not Satya Nadella, he comes to you, Brent. He says, Brent, how do I win back investors? How do I convince them, you know, I'm an AI winner? What would you tell him, Brent?

00:18 Brent

I'd say keep doing what you're doing. I mean, he's delivering on mid mid-teen growth, good healthy operating margins.

00:23 Brent

Think about this. They declared war on AI two, three years ago. They've improved their revenue growth, they've improved their backlog growth.

00:29 Brent

They've improved margins. Like, they're doing what they can do.

00:32 Brent

So the first thing is, you know, like, I'm I'm on my knees saying, hey, like, great job, congrats, right?

00:38 Brent

Like, they're doing fundamentally everything you could do.

00:41 Brent

The thing that that that you you would ask him to do is inflect and show faster Azure growth, faster uh, M365 growth.

00:49 Brent

Like, Microsoft's putting up high for high 30% uh infrastructure growth, uh a mid-teen uh M365 growth, putting up improving margins in the face of all this AI, and no one cares.

00:59 Brent

Like, it's crazy. Like, the numbers are stable. They're not, they're not going down. They're stable.

01:04 Brent

on a base that's huge.

01:06 Brent

And so, can Microsoft inflect at 20, 25% growth? I don't think so on these numbers.

01:11 Brent

So the the reality is that I think what investors want from him is something he may not be able to give you.

01:17 Brent

Right? We're seeing it in all the other sectors outside of tech, right? We're seeing other sectors uh or inside tech also inflect.

01:24 Brent

We're not seeing that. So I I I would say like I don't think there's anything on my wish list you could say other than can you accelerate your growth faster? And they've said we can't because we physically don't have enough data center space.

01:32 Brent

So, maybe they got to go buy a bunch of warehouses and convert them to DCs faster. I mean, that that's it, but

01:38 Brent

like, what's these numbers aren't bad. They're they're amazing numbers.

01:42 Brent

It's just investor expectations are Microsoft's going to get replaced with soon some new AI agent, they're not inflecting, so I'll just go buy SanDisk, Micron, and energy. I'll go somewhere else.

01:51 Speaker A

Brent, I had about

01:53 Brent

He can't he can't solve that.

01:53 Speaker A

I had about 10 other names I wanted to run by you, but I will save it for next time, my friend. Thank you as always for your time.

01:58 Speaker A

Appreciate it, sir.

01:59 Brent

Thank you.

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