Microsoft 4Q26: Breakout!!! not stagnation.

Research evidence excerpt

Microsoft 4Q26: Breakout!!! not stagnation.

Mark L. Moerdler, Ph.D. +1 917 344 8506 mark.moerdler@bernsteinsg.com 30 July 2026

• Are enterprises delaying non-AI expenses to fund AI? We understand that there were none of the issues that IBM called

on their recent earnings (IBM FQ2'26: Nothing broken; Market-perform TP $230) were seen by Microsoft in terms of deal

sizes or the cadence of deal closures.

EXHIBIT 2: Results vs. Consensus Estimates

4Q26 Consensus vs. Actual Surprise

Consensus 87,620

Revenue 2.7%

Actual 90,007

Consensus 39,050

Operating Income 4.0%

Actual 40,603

Consensus 44.5%

Operating Margin 0.6%

Actual 45.1%

Consensus 4.24

EPS (GAAP) 13.4%

Actual 4.81

Consensus 51,210

Cash from Operations 8.3%

Actual 55,441

Consensus 66.6%

Gross Margin 0.6%

Actual 67.2%

Source: Company reports, StreetAccount, Bernstein analysis

IMPACT THE CHANGE IN THE USEFUL LIFE OF DATACENTERS

Microsoft has a history of periodically reviewing the useful life of their major Cloud assets. After having made significant

changes from both a hardware and software perspectives, they were able to increase the useful life of servers from 3 to 6 years.

How long AI / mixed use datacenters can be used has been an area of disagreement within the industry and investors. There

have been some that argued that the increased power and electrical requirements of AI servers would negatively impact the

useful life. In addition with all the redesign in how datacenters would need to be built and operate in an AI world some have been

concerned that rebuilding of datacenters may be needed.

This quarter management announced that they were increasing the useful life of their datacenter facilities from 15 years to 25

years. This has a material impact on both Microsoft owned datacenters and some leased datacenters.