Microsoft just had the biggest single day any company has ever had on the stock market. Its shares closed up 15.5% on Thursday, adding roughly $450 billion to its market value — the largest one-day increase in market capitalization in stock market history, according to Bloomberg's Subrat Patnaik. Coverage on MSN described it as Microsoft's best day since 2008.
The trigger was earnings. Reports from Yahoo Finance and TradingView credit accelerating Azure growth for a quarter that beat expectations, and barchart.com framed the result as easing investor fears that Big Tech's enormous AI spending isn't paying off. Those fears had driven a sharp sell-off the day before.
The relief spread fast. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq posted their best day in a month. Chip stocks rocketed, per CNBC's Samantha Subin: Sandisk closed up 26%, Lam Research and Micron each 18%, AMD 13%, Intel 11% and Arm 7%. Intel separately beat estimates with $16.1 billion in quarterly revenue, up from $12.9 billion a year earlier, The Hans India reported.
Asia followed on Friday. CNBC reported SK Hynix surged 25% and Samsung Electronics gained more than 20%, with the Kospi up over 15% — what MSN called South Korea's sharpest reversal on record. India's Sensex topped 78,000.
Not everything was up. Apple shares fell despite a 16% revenue jump, with Tim Cook warning that the impact of memory supply constraints will "increase significantly sequentially" and memory prices will keep rising, per MacRumors. Apple CFO Kevan Parekh told analysts Services passed 1.5 billion paid subscriptions, up from 1 billion in January 2025, TechCrunch reported. Amazon's cloud sales surged as it lifted AI spending to $220 billion, according to Ynetnews. And MSN noted inflation worries persist in the bond market even as PCE inflation retreated.
Why it matters: trillions in market value now hinge on whether AI spending turns into profit, and this week markets decided — at least for a day — that it does.