Microsoft's $45.2B Quarterly Capex Revealed as 12-Hour Outage Drags On
MSFT sits 50% above its 52-week low of $349.2.
Summary
Microsoft spent $45.2 billion on capital projects in fiscal Q1 2027 and expects roughly $170 billion for 2026, with December spending possibly topping $50 billion as data-center capacity expands. That capex pace is the number that matters for margins — it is running well above the $39.4 billion quarterly figure in the Q1 10-Q, so the AI buildout is accelerating rather than leveling off. Meanwhile the Microsoft 365 outage that started Thursday has now run more than 12 hours with no timeline for full restoration; servers in multiple regions went unavailable, the company paused deployments, rebalanced traffic and applied a fix, and says it found no evidence of malicious activity. The disruption also hit security products including Defender XDR, Safe Links and Purview, and broke Exchange Online integrations used by OpenAI and Claude tooling. Separately, Soros Fund Management cut its stake 35.7% to 122,166 shares as of September 30. The outage is a reputational and reliability problem for the cloud franchise, but the capex trajectory is the bigger swing factor for free cash flow.
At the time of this announcement, MSFT was trading at $522.46 on NASDAQ in the Technology sector, with a market capitalization of approximately $3.9T. The 52-week trading range was $349.20 to $559.15. This news item was assessed with negative market sentiment and an importance score of 7 out of 10. Source: Wiseek News.