Microsoft soars in after-hours trading after report

Microsoft, the American technology giant, rallied on the stock market after the markets closed after reporting better-than-expected results for the second quarter of the year, a period in which it achieved a 27% increase in revenue from cloud services.

The company's earnings per share rose to $3.65 for the quarter ended June 30, up from $2.95 a year earlier, beating the FactSet consensus of $3.37. Revenue increased 18% to $76.44 billion, beating Wall Street's forecast of $73.86 billion.

"Cloud and AI are driving business transformation across every industry," said Satya Nadella, Microsoft president and CEO, in a statement. "We're innovating across the technology spectrum to help customers adapt and grow in this new era, and this year, Azure surpassed $75 billion in revenue, up 34%, driven by growth across all workloads."

Shares rose 8% in after-hours trading on the Nasdaq market on Wednesday.

Cloud services revenue increased 27% to $46.7 billion, Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood said in a statement.

Intelligent Cloud segment sales increased 26% year-over-year to $29.88 billion, driven by a 39% increase in the Azure cloud computing platform and other cloud services.

The Productivity and Business Processes division saw sales increase 16% to $33.11 billion in the fourth quarter, driven by gains from 365 and LinkedIn.

For its part, the more personal computing unit increased by nearly 9%, reaching $13.45 billion, thanks to double-digit growth in Xbox sales.

Meta exceeds profits

Meta Platforms, the world's largest social media company, beat earnings expectations for the second quarter of the year and offered a better-than-expected outlook for the third quarter of 2025.

From April to June, Meta posted earnings per share of $7.14 on revenue of $47.5 billion. Analysts had expected earnings of $5.88 (on revenue of $44.08 billion).

Revenue for the quarter ending June 30 was $47.52 billion, up from $39.07 billion a year earlier.

In particular, advertising revenue rose to $46.5 billion, compared to the $44.07 billion forecast. The company's Reality Labs segment posted a loss of $4.5 billion, compared to expectations of $4.8 billion.

The company said the number of daily active users on its family of apps—Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram—will grow 6% annually to 3.48 billion through June 2025.

Meta said third-quarter sales will be in the range of $47.5 billion to $50.5 billion, above Wall Street estimates of $46.14 billion.

It also said capital expenditures will be between $66 billion and $72 billion, raising the lower end of the company's previous estimate of $64 billion and $72 billion.

"The primary driver of growth will be infrastructure costs, driven by a sharp acceleration in depreciation expense growth and higher operating costs as we continue to expand our infrastructure fleet," Meta CFO Susan Li wrote in a statement.

The earnings announcement comes amid a wave of spending and hiring for Meta's AI development. The Mark Zuckerberg-led company made a $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI in June, allowing Alexandr Wang, CEO of the data annotation startup, to co-lead the new Meta Superintelligence Labs as the company's chief AI officer.

In after-hours trading, Meta shares were up just over 9%, after losing 0.7% on Wednesday.