Microsoft posts ~$90B Q4 with Azure +43%, adds GPT-5.6 and Claude Sonnet 5 to Copilot

Microsoft's fiscal Q4 showed continued AI-driven cloud strength: ~$90B total revenue, $59.3B Microsoft Cloud, Azure growth of 43%, a $678B commercial-cloud backlog, and more than 30 million paid Copilot seats. The results reinforce Azure's position as the enterprise AI-cloud leader.

On product, Microsoft 365 Copilot integrated OpenAI's GPT-5.6 for stronger reasoning in Excel and the new Copilot Cowork, and added Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 5 for agentic multi-step work across documents and spreadsheets—a notable multi-model stance that hedges beyond OpenAI. Satya Nadella also amplified Mustafa Suleyman's announcement of MAI-Thinking-1, Microsoft's first from-scratch reasoning model, now in Microsoft Foundry.

Competitively, the multi-model Copilot and in-house MAI model signal Microsoft reducing single-vendor dependence on OpenAI even as the partnership deepens, positioning against Google Workspace's Gemini and AWS's Bedrock.

Skeptics note that seat counts and backlog don't directly reveal consumption or margins, and Wells Fargo warned software must prove workflow value amid the AI price war. Watch how quickly the GPT-5.6 and Claude Sonnet 5 Copilot features roll out to enterprise tenants and whether MAI-Thinking-1 is competitive on public benchmarks.