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Dwarkesh Patel
Where is the value going to be created in AI?

Satya Nadella
That's a great one. So I think there are two places where I can say with some confidence. One is the hyperscalers that do well, because the fundamental thing is if you sort of go back to even how Sam and others describe it, if intelligence is log of compute, whoever can do lots of compute is a big winner.

The other interesting thing is, if you look at underneath even any AI workload, like take ChatGPT, it's not like everybody's excited about what's happening on the GPU side, it's great. In fact, I think of my fleet even as a ratio of the AI accelerator to storage, to compute. And at scale, you've got to grow it.
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So our hyperscale business, Azure business, and other hyperscalers, I think that’s a big thing.
Then after that, it becomes a little fuzzy. You could say, hey, there is a winner-take-all model- I just don't see it. This, by the way, is the other thing I’ve learned: being very good at understanding what are winner-take-all markets and what are not winner-take-all markets is, in some sense, everything.
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Consumer markets sometimes can be winner-take-all, but anything where the buyer is a corporation, an enterprise, an IT department, they will want multiple suppliers. And so you got to be one of the multiple suppliers.
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Then above that, I think it's going to be the same old stuff, which is in consumer, in some categories, there may be some winner-take-all network effect. After all, ChatGPT is a great example.

Dwarkesh Patel
You recently reported that your yearly revenue from AI is $13 billion. But if you look at your year-on-year growth on that, in like four years, it'll be 10x that. You'll have $130 billion in revenue from AI, if the trend continues. If it does, what do you anticipate doing with all that intelligence, this industrial scale use?

Is it going to be through Office? Is it going to be you deploying it for others to host? You've got to have the AGIs to have $130 billion in revenue? What does it look like?

Satya Nadella
The way I come at it, Dwarkesh, it's a great question because at some level, if you're going to have this explosion, abundance, whatever, commodity of intelligence available, the first thing we have to observe is GDP growth.

Before I get to what Microsoft's revenue will look like, there's only one governor in all of this. This is where we get a little bit ahead of ourselves with all this AGI hype. Remember the developed world, which is what? 2% growth and if you adjust for inflation it’s zero?

So in 2025, as we sit here, I'm not an economist, at least I look at it and say we have a real growth challenge. So, the first thing that we all have to do is, when we say this is like the Industrial Revolution, let's have that Industrial Revolution type of growth.

That means to me, 10%, 7%, developed world, inflation-adjusted, growing at 5%. That's the real marker. It can't just be supply-side.

In fact that’s the thing, a lot of people are writing about it, and I'm glad they are, which is the big winners here are not going to be tech companies. The winners are going to be the broader industry that uses this commodity that, by the way, is abundant. Suddenly productivity goes up and the economy is growing at a faster rate. When that happens, we'll be fine as an industry.

But that's to me the moment. Us self-claiming some AGI milestone, that's just nonsensical benchmark hacking to me. The real benchmark is: the world growing at 10%.
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That is correct. But by the way, the classic supply side is, "Hey, let me build it and they’ll come." That's an argument, and after all we've done that, we've taken enough risk to go do it.

But at some point, the supply and demand have to map. That's why I'm tracking both sides of it. You can go off the rails completely when you are hyping yourself with the supply-side, versus really understanding how to translate that into real value to customers.

That's why I look at my inference revenue. That's one of the reasons why even the disclosure on the inference revenue... It's interesting that not many people are talking about their real revenue, but to me, that is important as a governor for how you think about it.

You're not going to say they have to symmetrically meet at any given point in time, but you need to have existence proof that you are able to parlay yesterday's, let’s call it capital, into today's demand, so that then you can again invest, maybe exponentially even, knowing that you're not going to be completely rate mismatched.

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