Microsoft shares reached a record recently after analysts at JPMorgan Chase predicted the growth prospects of the Company in artificial intelligence.
The stock increased 3.2% to close at $348.10, breaking its earlier all-time high record in November 2021.
AI has been a buzzword all year, since OpenAI in November 2022 released the ChatGPT chatbot, which went viral quickly. Since then, tech firms have rushed to include the technology in their products and features.
Microsoft is a major beneficiary of the emerging growth of ChatGPT and tangential products. Microsoft has heavily invested in OpenAI and it also provides the underlying computing power. It has an exclusive license on OpenAI’s models, such as the GPT-4 large language model.
Microsoft has included OpenAI tools in its Bing search engine and the Windows operating system.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella At the company’s event in February said, “It’s an exciting time in tech.”
Microsoft finance chief Amy Hood expects, “Fiscal fourth-quarter growth for Azure cloud of 26% to 27% year over year in constant currency, with 1 percentage point of it coming from AI services.”
Hood predicted, “The next generation AI business will be the fastest-growing $10 billion business in our history.”
In the last four quarters, Microsoft has collected almost $208 billion in total revenue.
Microsoft technology Chief Kevin Scott said, “Because it really is a very general platform, we have lots of different ways that $10 billion of annual recurring revenue is going to first show up.”
Scott said, “There are all the people who want to come to use our infrastructure, whether they’re training their own models, whether they are running an open-source model they’ve got, or whether they are making API calls into one of the big frontier models that we’ve built with OpenAI.”
JPMorgan analysts lifted their price target to $350 from earlier $315.
