Microsoft shares jumped about 8% in early New York trading on Thursday, lifting the company’s market value above $4 trillion and making it only the second publicly traded firm, after Nvidia, to cross that threshold. The surge followed fiscal fourth-quarter results released late Wednesday that topped analyst estimates on both revenue and profit. The Redmond, Washington-based company reported earnings of $3.65 a share on revenue of $76.4 billion, versus Street forecasts of $3.37 and $73.8 billion. Sales in the Intelligent Cloud unit climbed 26%, with Azure and other cloud services growing 39%. Microsoft disclosed for the first time that Azure generated more than $75 billion in annual revenue. Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella said cloud and artificial-intelligence workloads are driving “business transformation across every industry.” Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood projected more than $30 billion of capital spending in the current quarter and narrowed fiscal-2025 capex guidance to $66 billion–$72 billion. Meta Platforms also posted a double beat, sending its shares up roughly 12%. The social-media company delivered second-quarter earnings of $7.14 a share on revenue of $47.52 billion, ahead of consensus estimates of $5.89 and $44.83 billion. Meta forecast third-quarter revenue of $47.5 billion to $50.5 billion and lifted its full-year capital-expenditure outlook to the same $66 billion–$72 billion range signalled by Microsoft, underscoring the scale of spending required for generative-AI infrastructure. Strong results from the two artificial-intelligence bellwethers propelled S&P 500 and Nasdaq futures to fresh records and prompted several brokerages, including Barclays and Truist, to raise Microsoft price targets to as high as $650. Analysts flagged the elevated capex plans at both companies as a likely tail-wind for chip and data-centre suppliers such as AMD and Broadcom.