Technology

See also: Technical analysis on Amazon · Amazon company tracker

Last Updated: 16 August 2026

Amazon.com, Inc. is three very different businesses wearing one ticker. It is the largest online retailer in the Western world, it owns the largest public cloud platform on earth, and it now runs an advertising operation approaching an $80bn annual run-rate. In the twelve months to 30 June 2026 the group turned over $775.7bn and produced $93.7bn of operating income. It is also, right now, one of the most capital-hungry companies in corporate history: management has guided to roughly $220bn of capital expenditure in 2026 alone, and trailing free cash flow has turned negative as a result. This report sets out what Amazon reported, what it has committed to spend, and where the pressure points sit. No analyst opinions, no price targets.

1. Company Snapshot

Useful ChartsView tools while you read: Live Charts for the price action referenced below, and the Economic Calendar for the macro releases that move large-cap consumer and technology names.

2. Bull Case and Bear Case

Bull Case

• AWS has re-accelerated hard: AWS grew 36.7 per cent year on year in Q2 2026 to $42,232m, the fastest rate in eighteen quarters, with operating margin at 39.4 per cent and segment operating income of $16,621m. Remaining performance obligations stood at $496bn, up from $364bn only one quarter earlier.
• Three profit engines, not one: FY2025 operating income of $79,975m came from North America ($29,619m), International ($4,750m) and AWS ($45,606m). The International segment, loss-making as recently as 2022, is now profitable, and advertising services revenue reached $68,635m in FY2025 and grew 26 per cent in Q2 2026.
• Operating leverage is real: operating income rose from $12,248m in FY2022 to $79,975m in FY2025 on revenue growth of 39 per cent over the same period. Trailing twelve-month operating income now stands at $93,712m against $37,576m in the first half of 2025 alone.
• Custom silicon is scaling: management disclosed that the AWS AI business and the AWS custom-chip business each exceeded a $25bn annualised run-rate in Q2 2026, both growing at triple-digit rates, with Trainium capacity contracted by Anthropic and OpenAI under multi-year, multi-gigawatt commitments.
• Balance sheet capacity to fund the build: Amazon held $78,213m of cash and $44,775m of current marketable securities at 30 June 2026 against $132,224m of borrowings, and generated $161,403m of operating cash flow over the trailing twelve months.

Bear Case

• Free cash flow has gone negative: trailing twelve-month operating cash flow of $161,403m was more than absorbed by $173,028m of purchases of property and equipment, leaving free cash flow of minus $11,625m. The 2026 capital expenditure plan was raised from roughly $200bn to roughly $220bn during the year.
• Depreciation is compounding into the P and L: trailing twelve-month depreciation and amortisation reached $75,200m, against $58,562m for the equivalent period a year earlier. Every data centre placed in service adds a fixed charge that must be earned back.
• Debt has more than doubled in six months: total borrowings rose from $68,396m at 31 December 2025 to $132,224m at 30 June 2026 as Amazon funded the AI build with the bond market. Interest cost now scales with the capex plan.
• Rivals are growing their clouds faster: Google Cloud grew 82 per cent year on year in Q2 2026 to $24.77bn and Microsoft's Azure was growing at around 39 to 40 per cent, both from smaller bases but both above AWS on a percentage basis for much of the past two years.
• Unresolved regulatory overhang: the US Federal Trade Commission's monopolisation case is scheduled for trial in early 2027, and the European Commission issued a preliminary view in June 2026 that AWS should be designated under the Digital Markets Act.

3. Business Segments

Amazon reports three operating segments. The FY2025 split, from the audited financial statements, is set out below.

Amazon also discloses revenue by product line. In FY2025 that was: online stores $268,036m, third-party seller services $172,162m, AWS $128,725m, advertising services $68,635m, subscription services $49,619m, physical stores $22,561m and other $5,935m. Advertising was running at roughly a $79bn annualised rate on the Q2 2026 quarterly figure of $19,809m.

4. Business Model and Moat

How it makes money. Amazon earns on three distinct economic models. In retail it takes a gross margin on goods it owns and a commission plus fulfilment fee on goods sold by third parties, and third-party seller services alone produced $172,162m in FY2025. In cloud it rents metered compute and storage at a 39.4 per cent segment operating margin. In advertising it monetises the purchase intent of shoppers already on its properties at very high incremental margin. The mix matters: AWS and advertising together were roughly 27.5 per cent of FY2025 revenue but carry the great majority of the group's profit.

What protects it. The retail moat is logistics density. Amazon has spent two decades building a delivery network whose per-parcel cost falls as volume rises, and which competitors would have to replicate at scale before they could match delivery promises. Same-day grocery now reaches more than 2,300 US cities and towns. The AWS moat is switching cost and gravity: enterprise data, once resident in a cloud, is expensive and risky to move, and the remaining performance obligation balance of $496bn is contractual evidence of that lock-in. The advertising moat is first-party purchase data that Apple's privacy changes did not touch, because the transaction happens inside Amazon's own walls.

Where the model is being stress-tested. The current capital cycle is unlike anything Amazon has run before. Purchases of property and equipment were $131,819m in FY2025 and $98,411m in the first half of 2026 alone. Management has explicitly said capacity will not meet demand through 2027, which is a statement about scarcity rather than weakness, but it also means the depreciation charge is being locked in years ahead of the revenue that is meant to service it.

Capital allocation. Amazon pays no dividend and has historically preferred reinvestment to distribution. The 2026 change is that reinvestment is now partly debt-funded: borrowings rose from $68,396m at the end of 2025 to $132,224m by 30 June 2026.

5. Financial Health

All figures below are taken from Amazon's audited annual reports on Form 10-K and its quarterly earnings releases on Form 8-K. Dollar amounts are in millions unless stated.

† Amazon does not publish a non-GAAP adjusted earnings per share measure in any of its quarterly or annual releases. GAAP diluted EPS is repeated in the Adjusted EPS column so the table remains comparable. All per-share figures are stated on a post-split basis following the 20-for-1 stock split effective 6 June 2022.
‡ Amazon has never declared or paid a cash dividend on its common stock.

Two observations on the quarterly table. First, Q2 2026 GAAP diluted EPS of $5.75 is not a clean operating number: net income of $62,647m in the quarter included roughly $53.4bn of pre-tax non-operating other income, principally an unrealised gain on Amazon's Anthropic investment, against operating income of only $27,461m. Second, the year-on-year operating improvement is genuine even after stripping that out, with Q2 2026 operating income of $27,461m against $19,171m a year earlier, an increase of 43 per cent.

Cash flow and balance sheet, twelve months to 30 June 2026: operating cash flow $161,403m, purchases of property and equipment $173,028m, giving free cash flow of minus $11,625m. Depreciation and amortisation $75,200m. At 30 June 2026 the balance sheet carried $128,894m of long-term debt, $3,330m of current portion, $78,213m of cash and cash equivalents and $44,775m of current marketable securities.

6. Valuation Metrics

Raw metrics, August 2026. Not opinions on whether the stock is cheap or expensive.

7. What Are They Building

Silicon. Trainium2 is fully subscribed with 1.4 million chips landed and now serves the majority of Amazon Bedrock inference. Trainium3 is in production and Trainium4, promising roughly six times the FP4 compute of Trainium3, is slated for 2027. On the general-purpose side, Graviton5 reached general availability and is used by the overwhelming majority of the largest EC2 customers. Project Rainier, a cluster of more than 500,000 Trainium2 chips, is the compute base Anthropic uses to train Claude.

Models and agents. The Nova family now spans Nova 2 Lite, Nova 2 Pro and the multilingual Nova 2 Sonic, with Nova Forge for customer-specific fine-tuning and Nova Act for agents that operate software interfaces. Bedrock AgentCore added payments, web search, policy, evaluation and memory primitives during 2026.

Consumer AI. Alexa+ rolled out to Germany, Austria, France and Brazil during the second quarter of 2026 and reached Australia in early access in August 2026, its first Asia-Pacific market. Alexa and the Rufus shopping assistant have been merged into a single shopping experience.

Connectivity. Amazon Leo, previously Project Kuiper, entered enterprise beta in April 2026 with Verizon, AT&T, Vodafone, JetBlue and NASA among the named partners. Amazon agreed to acquire Globalstar for $11.6bn in April 2026 to secure direct-to-device spectrum.

Robotics and logistics. The next-generation Proteus autonomous mobile robot handles loads to 1,300 pounds and takes conversational instruction. Amazon acquired Fauna Robotics in March 2026. Its Zoox subsidiary received the first NHTSA Part 555 exemption permitting paid robotaxi rides.

Advertising. The Ads Agent campaign-building tool expanded to eleven countries during 2026, supporting an advertising line growing 26 per cent year on year at a roughly $79bn annualised run-rate.

8. Competitive Landscape

Amazon competes on three fronts at once, so the peer set spans cloud, retail and advertising. Market capitalisations are as at the 14 August 2026 close.

On Synergy Research's Q1 2026 estimate AWS held roughly 28 per cent of global cloud infrastructure spend against 21 per cent for Azure and 14 per cent for Google Cloud. AWS retains the largest share but has, for much of the past two years, grown more slowly in percentage terms than either challenger, a gap that narrowed sharply with the 36.7 per cent print in Q2 2026.

9. Insider Activity

Andy Jassy has been President and Chief Executive Officer since July 2021, and Jeff Bezos, the founder, continues as Executive Chair. Both are among the sellers listed below. Every 2026 transaction identified in SEC Form 4 filings was a disposal executed under a pre-arranged Rule 10b5-1 trading plan; no open-market purchases by executives were found. For very large long-tenured shareholdings, scheduled plan sales are the normal mechanism for diversification and carry limited signalling value on their own.

10. Key Risks

• Capital intensity and negative free cash flow: the 2026 capital expenditure plan of roughly $220bn, raised from roughly $200bn during the year on higher memory-chip costs, has already pushed trailing free cash flow to minus $11,625m. If cloud demand disappoints, the spend is largely already committed.
• Depreciation drag on future margins: trailing twelve-month depreciation and amortisation of $75,200m is up 28 per cent year on year. Data centre assets placed in service create a fixed charge regardless of utilisation, and the charge lands ahead of the revenue meant to cover it.
• Leverage has risen sharply: total borrowings roughly doubled from $68,396m at 31 December 2025 to $132,224m at 30 June 2026. Amazon retains substantial liquidity, but the interest burden now scales with a capex programme whose payback period is unproven.
• Antitrust and regulatory exposure: the FTC's monopolisation case is scheduled for trial in early 2027, and the European Commission signalled in June 2026 a preliminary view that AWS should be designated under the Digital Markets Act, which carries turnover-based penalty exposure and structural remedies as possible outcomes.
• Cloud competition: Google Cloud grew 82 per cent year on year in Q2 2026 and Azure around 39 to 40 per cent. AWS's re-acceleration to 36.7 per cent narrows but does not close that gap, and enterprise multi-cloud procurement makes share defensible only on price and capability.
• Satellite programme execution: Amazon Leo had roughly 210 to 241 satellites in orbit against an FCC requirement of 1,618 by 30 July 2026 and has applied for a two-year extension. A refusal would put licensed spectrum at risk.
• Labour relations and restructuring: approximately 30,000 corporate roles have been cut since October 2025, including around 16,000 announced in January 2026, and Amazon settled an NLRB-mediated dispute with the Teamsters in March 2026. Both carry execution, morale and cost risk.
• Currency and input costs: Q3 2026 guidance embeds roughly 80 basis points of unfavourable foreign exchange impact, and memory-chip cost inflation was cited by management as the direct reason for raising the capital expenditure guidance.

11. Recent Developments

• 28 Jan 2026 — Amazon announces approximately 16,000 corporate job cuts. Framed as an anti-bureaucracy programme tied to AI-driven efficiency, bringing total corporate reductions since October 2025 to roughly 30,000 roles.
• 31 Jan 2026 — FCC approves 4,500 additional Amazon Leo satellites. The authorisation takes the planned constellation to 7,727 satellites.
• 5 Feb 2026 — FY2025 results published. Full-year net sales of $716,924m, operating income $79,975m and diluted EPS $7.17, with initial 2026 capital expenditure guidance of roughly $200bn.
• 31 Mar 2026 — NLRB-mediated settlement with the Teamsters. Amazon agreed not to retaliate against striking workers and to restore docked unpaid time off.
• 08 Apr 2026 — Amazon Leo enters enterprise beta. Verizon, AT&T, Vodafone, JetBlue and NASA named among launch partners for the rebranded satellite programme.
• 14 Apr 2026 — Amazon agrees to acquire Globalstar for $11.6bn. The deal secures direct-to-device satellite spectrum and includes an Apple iPhone emergency-SOS partnership routed via Amazon Leo.
• 20 May 2026 — Annual Meeting of Shareholders held virtually.
• 25 Jun 2026 — European Commission issues a preliminary view on AWS. The Commission indicated AWS should be designated a gatekeeper service under the Digital Markets Act, with a final decision expected by the end of 2026.
• 30 Jul 2026 — Q2 2026 results. Net sales of $200,606m, up 19.6 per cent; AWS up 36.7 per cent to $42,232m, the fastest in eighteen quarters; AWS remaining performance obligations of $496bn; 2026 capital expenditure guidance raised to roughly $220bn.
• 03 Aug 2026 — Market capitalisation tops $3 trillion intraday. The shares reached $287.20 on the day; Jeff Bezos sold 1,209,649 shares for approximately $346.5m under a pre-arranged plan.
• 06 Aug 2026 — Alexa+ launches in Australia in early access. The first Asia-Pacific market for the AI assistant.

12. Key Dates to Watch

• Expected Oct 2026 — Q3 2026 results. Amazon has not yet confirmed the date on its investor relations site; the company has reported the third quarter in the final week of October in each of the last several years. Guidance for the quarter is net sales of $197.0bn to $202.0bn and operating income of $22.5bn to $26.5bn.
• Expected Dec 2026 — European Commission final decision on whether AWS is designated under the Digital Markets Act, following the preliminary view issued in June 2026.
• Expected Dec 2026 — AWS re:Invent, the annual customer conference at which Amazon has historically unveiled its silicon and model roadmap.
• Expected Feb 2027 — Q4 and FY2026 results, including the first full-year capital expenditure outturn against the roughly $220bn plan and initial 2027 guidance.
• TBC 2027 — Federal Trade Commission monopolisation trial before Judge Chun, currently scheduled for early 2027.
• TBD — FCC ruling on Amazon's requested two-year extension to the Amazon Leo satellite deployment milestone that fell due on 30 July 2026.

Quarterly reporting dates are confirmed by Amazon roughly three weeks in advance on its investor relations site. Track the release calendar alongside the macro schedule on the ChartsView Economic Calendar, and discuss the numbers with other members in the ChartsView Forum.

Disclaimer: This research is produced by ChartsView for educational and informational purposes only. It does not constitute financial advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. All information is sourced from publicly available company filings, press releases, and official data. ChartsView does not use analyst opinions or third-party ratings. Always conduct your own due diligence and consider your personal financial situation before making investment decisions. Past performance is not indicative of future results.

See also: Technical analysis on Palantir · Palantir company tracker

Last Updated: 5 September 2026

Palantir Technologies (NASDAQ: PLTR) builds data-integration and AI software platforms for governments and large enterprises. Its most recent reported period is Q2 2026 (quarter ended 30 June 2026, reported 3 August 2026); Q3 2026 has not yet been reported. The company delivered $1,935m of quarterly revenue, up 93% year on year, and raised full-year 2026 revenue guidance for the second time this year to $8,150m to $8,158m. This report refreshes every section against the latest 10-Q, the Q2 2026 earnings release and SEC XBRL data. You can track the shares on our live charts, check upcoming macro dates on the economic calendar, and discuss the company in the ChartsView forum.

1. Company Snapshot

2. Bull vs Bear Case

Bull Case

• AI platform demand is compounding, not plateauing: revenue growth accelerated for the ninth straight quarter to 93% in Q2 2026, with US commercial revenue up 149% to $764m and US commercial remaining deal value up 124% to $6.2bn, implying a long runway of contracted work.
• Government franchise is widening internationally: US government revenue grew 90% to $809m in Q2 2026, the US Army enterprise agreement runs for a decade at up to $10bn, NATO has adopted the Maven Smart System on a sole-source basis and the UK Ministry of Defence signed a £240.6m follow-on agreement effective 1 April 2026.
• Profitability is unusually high for a growth business: Q2 2026 GAAP operating margin was 47% and adjusted operating margin 62%, giving a Rule of 40 score of 155%; management guides FY2026 adjusted operating income of $4,889m to $4,897m on revenue of ~$8.15bn.
• Fortress balance sheet: $9.4bn of cash and marketable securities with no funded debt at 30 June 2026, trailing free cash flow of ~$3.4bn, and a customer base that pays upfront (customer deposits and deferred revenue).
• Guidance has been raised three times in eight months: FY2026 revenue guidance moved from $7,182m to $7,198m in February to $7,650m to $7,662m in May and to $8,150m to $8,158m in August, a pattern that has repeatedly reset expectations upwards.

Bear Case

• Valuation leaves no room for error: at ~149x trailing GAAP earnings, ~68x trailing sales and ~125x trailing free cash flow, the shares price in many years of hyper-growth; even a small deceleration has historically produced 30%-plus drawdowns.
• Relentless insider selling: co-founders and officers sold hundreds of millions of dollars of stock in 2026 alone, including Peter Thiel's $289.7m sale in March and Alex Karp's $86.1m sale in August, most of it under pre-arranged 10b5-1 plans but on a scale that caps share-count reduction.
• Stock-based compensation and dilution: SBC was $684m in FY2025 and $467m in the first half of 2026 alone; diluted share count has grown from 1.92bn in FY2021 to 2.57bn, so per-share metrics lag headline growth.
• Concentration and political exposure: US government work was 41% of FY2025 revenue and the US as a whole 74%; the company is exposed to budget cycles, procurement disputes and a pending 10th Circuit securities class action, while international commercial revenue is shrinking as a share of the mix.

3. Business Segments

Palantir reports two operating segments, Commercial and Government, and since 2024 has emphasised a US commercial / US government / international disclosure in its earnings releases. The table below uses the FY2025 disclosure (total revenue $4,475.4m).

4. Business Model & Moat

How it makes money. Palantir licenses software platforms on a subscription basis, priced per deployment and scaled by data volume, users and modules. The two core products are Gotham (defence and intelligence) and Foundry (commercial data operations), delivered through Apollo (continuous deployment across cloud, on-premise and classified environments). Since 2023 the Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP) has layered large language models on top of the Foundry Ontology, letting customers build agents that act on live operational data. Contracts are typically multi-year, paid partly upfront, and expand once a deployment proves itself, which is why total contract value closed ($3.37bn in Q2 2026) and remaining deal value are the leading indicators management highlights.

Where the moat lies. The Ontology is the durable asset: once a customer's entities, relationships and actions are modelled in Palantir's semantic layer, workflows, permissions and AI agents all depend on it, and re-platforming is expensive and slow. In government, accreditation for classified networks (IL5 and IL6, plus FedRAMP) and a two-decade operating history with the US intelligence community and NATO create barriers that hyperscalers and start-ups cannot quickly replicate. The FedStart programme extends this by letting other software vendors ride on Palantir's federal authorisations.

Unit economics and operating leverage. Gross margin runs at about 85% (Q2 2026 cost of revenue $297m on $1,935m of revenue) and operating expenses are growing far slower than revenue, so GAAP operating margin has moved from a 9% loss in FY2022 to 47% in Q2 2026. The offset is stock-based compensation, which is added back in adjusted figures and remains one of the largest single cost lines.

Go-to-market. Palantir sells through forward-deployed engineers embedded with customers, AIP bootcamps that compress evaluation to days, AIPCon customer conferences (AIPCon 9 in March 2026 and AIPCon 10 in June 2026) and partner channels such as the newly expanded PwC alliance, Mercury Systems and Zeta Global.

5. Financial Health

All figures are from Palantir's 10-K filings, quarterly earnings releases and the SEC XBRL companyfacts dataset. Palantir carries no funded debt; the FY2021 balance sheet was the last to show a long-term debt line, and it was zero. Adjusted EPS excludes stock-based compensation and related employer payroll taxes, per the company's non-GAAP reconciliation.

Quarterly detail, most recent first. Revenue in $m. The FY2025 row is the audited full-year total.

Cash generation has scaled with revenue. FY2025 operating cash flow was $2,134.5m against capital expenditure of $33.9m, and the first half of 2026 alone produced $2,115.3m of operating cash flow against $22.0m of capex. On a trailing-twelve-month basis to 30 June 2026 (FY2025 less H1 2025 plus H1 2026), revenue is $6,155.9m, GAAP net income $3,016.7m, operating income $2,634.6m, depreciation and amortisation $28.0m, operating cash flow $3,400.3m and capex $42.0m. Note that GAAP net income now exceeds operating income because of roughly $0.4bn of annual interest income on the $9.4bn cash pile. Diluted shares averaged 2,568.7m in Q2 2026, up from 1,923.6m in FY2021; the $1bn buyback authorised in 2023 had absorbed only $75.0m of repurchases in FY2025.

6. Valuation Metrics

Raw metrics, September 2026. Not opinions on whether the stock is cheap or expensive.

Price basis: $174.33 close on 4 September 2026. Share count 2,403.1m (Class A 2,300.7m, Class B 101.3m, Class F 1.0m per the Q2 2026 10-Q cover, 27 July 2026). Trailing figures are the twelve months to 30 June 2026 built from the 10-K and 10-Q filings.

7. What Are They Building

AIP and the Ontology. The Artificial Intelligence Platform remains the growth engine. It connects large language models (including customer-chosen or sovereign models) to the Foundry Ontology so that AI agents can read live enterprise data and trigger actions with permissions and audit trails. In July 2026 Palantir and Nvidia announced a sovereign-AI arrangement that lets US agencies and critical-infrastructure operators run and retrain Nvidia Nemotron models inside Palantir's locked-down infrastructure.

Maven Smart System and defence. Maven is Palantir's AI targeting and decision-support system for the US Department of Defense. In 2026 NATO agreed a sole-source procurement of Maven Smart System NATO after adoption across nine member nations, one of the fastest procurement cycles in the alliance's history. The UK Ministry of Defence's £240.6m enterprise agreement, effective 1 April 2026, more than triples the prior £75.2m 2022 deal and is designed to interoperate with NATO systems.

Warp Speed for manufacturing. Warp Speed is a manufacturing operating system built on Foundry. "Warp Speed for Warships", launched with the BlueForge Alliance, digitises US Navy shipbuilding supply chains; other Warp Speed customers include Anduril, Panasonic Energy, Epirus, Red Cat, Saildrone, Saronic, Ursa Major and Sierra Nevada Corporation. Mercury Systems (announced alongside Q2 2026 results) is using it to automate material planning and build a digital twin of its defence supply chain.

Partner ecosystem and FedStart. The PwC alliance expanded on 3 September 2026 to target M&A integration and ERP transformation work. Zeta Global is re-architecting its marketing Data Cloud on Foundry. FedStart lets third-party software vendors (for example Oligo Security, which joined in June 2026) obtain federal authority-to-operate by running on Palantir's accredited cloud, turning Palantir into a distribution layer for other vendors' software in government.

8. Peer Comparison

Market caps are as of the 4 September 2026 close. Metrics are the latest reported by each company.

9. Insider Activity

CEO Alex Karp, chairman Peter Thiel, president Stephen Cohen and CTO Shyam Sankar all sold stock in 2026, largely through option exercises and pre-scheduled Rule 10b5-1 plans that vest and sell on the 20th of February, May and August. The largest single transaction was Thiel's 2,000,000-share sale on 2 March 2026 for $289.7m, after which he still held 68.9m shares indirectly. Karp's August 2026 sale of 492,348 shares at $174.79 raised $86.1m. CFO David Glazer's sales were far smaller (17,438 shares in February and 17,128 in May). Source: SEC Form 4 filings, CIK 1321655.

10. Key Risks

• Valuation compression: the shares trade at ~149x trailing GAAP earnings and ~68x trailing sales; the stock has already fallen about 16% from its 52-week high of $207.52 despite accelerating growth, showing how sensitive the price is to sentiment rather than results.
• US government concentration and budget politics: US government customers supplied 41% of FY2025 revenue and 42% of Q2 2026 revenue; continuing resolutions, procurement protests, changes in Pentagon AI policy (a federal judge ruled a Pentagon AI-related restriction unlawful on 29 August 2026) and shifting political alignment can all move large contracts.
• Securities litigation: a CalPERS-led securities-fraud class action alleging executives sold more than $2.2bn of stock while making misleading statements about government-revenue sustainability was revived and argued before the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in March 2026; a ruling remains pending.
• Insider selling and governance: the founders' Class F shares give them 49.999999% voting control regardless of economic ownership, and officers and directors sold well over $600m of stock in 2026; the structure limits shareholder influence over capital allocation and compensation.
• Stock-based compensation and dilution: SBC of $684m in FY2025 and $467m in H1 2026 keeps GAAP margins well below adjusted margins and has expanded the diluted share count by a third since FY2021, while buybacks have been negligible ($75m in FY2025).
• Competitive convergence: Microsoft, Oracle, Snowflake, Databricks and the hyperscalers are embedding agentic AI directly into data platforms that customers already own; Databricks alone runs at ~$5.4bn of annualised revenue and is preparing an IPO, and enterprise AI budgets could consolidate around incumbents.
• International softness and reputational exposure: international revenue fell to roughly 19% of the total in Q2 2026, and Palantir's defence, immigration-enforcement and health-data work (UK NHS Federated Data Platform, US government agencies) attracts activist scrutiny that has cost it commercial and public-sector deals in Europe before.

11. Recent Developments

• 03 Sep 2026 — PwC alliance expanded. PwC and Palantir widened their strategic alliance to scale enterprise AI, targeting M&A integration and ERP transformation programmes; the shares rose about 7% on the day, partly reversing weakness after a widely circulated bearish thesis from investor Michael Burry.
• 29 Aug 2026 — Court ruling on Pentagon AI restriction. A federal judge ruled a Pentagon AI-related ban unlawful, a decision commentators read as supportive of Palantir's defence pipeline, including Maven Smart System expansion.
• 20 Aug 2026 — CEO Alex Karp sells $86.1m of stock. Karp exercised options and sold 492,348 shares at $174.79 under his 10b5-1 plan, the latest in a quarterly sequence of founder sales.
• 03 Aug 2026 — Q2 2026 results and third guidance raise. Revenue rose 93% to $1,935m, US commercial revenue 149% to $764m and US government 90% to $809m; GAAP EPS was $0.41, adjusted free cash flow $1,220m (63% margin), and FY2026 revenue guidance was lifted to $8,150m to $8,158m with adjusted FCF of $4.5bn to $4.7bn.
• 03 Aug 2026 — Mercury Systems partnership. Announced alongside the results, Mercury Systems will use Warp Speed to automate material planning and build a digital twin of its defence-electronics supply chain.
• 02 Jul 2026 — CTO Shyam Sankar sells 185,000 shares. The $24.1m sale at $130.00 was executed under a 10b5-1 plan; Sankar sold a further 35,000 shares on 6 August 2026.
• 04 Jun 2026 — AIPCon 10. Palantir's tenth customer conference showcased AIP and Ontology deployments across defence, healthcare and manufacturing customers, three months after AIPCon 9 on 12 March 2026.
• 01 Apr 2026 — UK Ministry of Defence agreement takes effect. The £240.6m follow-on enterprise agreement, more than three times the prior £75.2m 2022 deal, covers data analytics for strategic and tactical decision-making and is designed to interoperate with NATO systems.
• 02 Mar 2026 — Peter Thiel sells 2,000,000 shares. The chairman's $289.7m sale at $144.85 was the largest single insider transaction of the year; he retained about 68.9m shares held indirectly.

12. Key Dates

• Expected 2 Nov 2026 — Q3 2026 results. Market-data calendars list 2 November after the close; some trackers show 9 November. Palantir had not published its own date announcement at the time of writing. Management guided Q3 revenue of $2,160m to $2,164m and adjusted operating income of $1,292m to $1,296m.
• Expected Dec 2026 — Nasdaq-100 annual reconstitution, relevant to index-fund flows in a stock that transferred to Nasdaq in November 2024 specifically to gain index eligibility.
• Expected Feb 2027 — Q4 and full-year 2026 results with initial FY2027 guidance, followed by the FY2026 10-K.
• TBC — 10th Circuit Court of Appeals decision on the revived securities-fraud class action argued in March 2026.

Ongoing items without a fixed date include the US Army enterprise agreement task orders, further NATO member adoptions of Maven Smart System and any announcement of AIPCon 11.

Disclaimer: This research is produced by ChartsView for educational and informational purposes only. It does not constitute financial advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. All information is sourced from publicly available company filings, press releases, and official data. ChartsView does not use analyst opinions or third-party ratings. Always conduct your own due diligence and consider your personal financial situation before making investment decisions. Past performance is not indicative of future results.

See also: Technical analysis on Microsoft · Microsoft company tracker

Last Updated: 3 September 2026

Microsoft closed fiscal 2026 on 30 June with revenue of $331,839m, operating income of $155,237m and Azure past $100bn of annual revenue for the first time. It also spent $115,948m on property and equipment in the year, plus $24,608m of finance leases, and has guided fiscal 2027 capital investment to approximately $175bn. That combination — record earnings alongside record capital consumption — is the whole argument about Microsoft in 2026, and it is why the shares were down roughly 19% year to date before the July results and then posted their biggest one-day gain since 2008. On 2 September 2026 Microsoft announced it is collapsing three reportable segments into two from fiscal 2027. This report sets out what the filings say, without ratings or price targets.

1. Company Snapshot

2. Bull and Bear Case

Bull Case

• Azure is accelerating, not maturing: Azure and other cloud services grew 43% in Q4 FY2026 against 40% in Q3, crossed $100bn of annual revenue for the first time in FY2026, and is guided to roughly 45% constant-currency growth in Q1 FY2027.
• The backlog is enormous and broadening: commercial remaining performance obligation reached $678bn at 30 June 2026, up 84% and up $51bn sequentially, with management attributing the sequential growth to customers other than AI model developers.
• Copilot has moved from pilot to installed base: Microsoft 365 Copilot passed 30 million paid seats in Q4 FY2026 from just over 20 million in April 2026, GitHub Copilot reached 50 million users, and the high-end E7 bundle has been bought by hundreds of enterprises covering millions of seats.
• Operating leverage is holding through the build: operating income grew 21% to $155,237m in FY2026 on 18% revenue growth, with a 45.1% operating margin in Q4, and guidance is for operating margin to remain relatively flat year on year in Q1 FY2027 despite the capital programme.
• The balance sheet carries no strain: total debt was $40,294m against $76,843m of cash and short-term investments at 30 June 2026 — a net cash position of $36.5bn — and Microsoft issued no debt at all in FY2026 while returning $16.7bn through buybacks and $26.4bn in dividends.

Bear Case

• Free cash flow is falling while earnings rise: FY2026 free cash flow of $67.0bn was below FY2025's $71.6bn despite net income rising 31%, and Q4 free cash flow fell 23% to $19.6bn. Amy Hood's assurance that Microsoft should remain free-cash-flow positive in FY2027 is a low bar for a company earning $134bn.
• Reported earnings are flattered by investment gains: $6.5bn of other income in FY2026 was net gains on the OpenAI investment, primarily a non-cash dilution gain, plus a $3.2bn Anthropic gain in Q4 alone. Non-GAAP net income grew 22%, not 31%, and the same line produced $4.8bn of losses in FY2025.
• Depreciation is compounding fast: depreciation expense went from $15.2bn in FY2024 to $22.0bn in FY2025 to $34.3bn in FY2026, and property and equipment net rose from $205bn to $313bn in a single year. Microsoft is simultaneously extending building useful lives from 15 to 25 years for FY2027, which slows the charge without improving operations.
• Concentration in one customer: OpenAI generated $24.1bn of Microsoft revenue in FY2026, roughly 7.3% of the company, with $6.0bn still in receivables at 30 June 2026, and Microsoft said in January 2026 that around 45% of its then-$625bn commercial backlog was tied to OpenAI. The agreement has been renegotiated twice in nine months.
• Rivals are growing faster from adjacent positions: Google Cloud grew 82% to $24.8bn in the June 2026 quarter with a $514bn backlog, AWS accelerated to 37% on a larger $169bn run-rate base, and Alphabet's market capitalisation now exceeds Microsoft's.

3. Business Segments

The table below is FY2026 as reported, on the three-segment basis used through the year ended 30 June 2026.

Two reporting changes matter when comparing history. Microsoft recast its segments in FY2025, moving much of the commercial Microsoft 365 business into Productivity and Business Processes, so figures published before August 2024 are not comparable without restatement. And on 2 September 2026 Microsoft announced a further change effective FY2027: two segments only, Agents and Infra covering the Microsoft Cloud, productivity and server licensing and support, and Devices and Consumer covering Windows, XBOX and advertising. On the restated FY2026 basis, Agents and Infra had revenue of $268,127m and operating income of $136,365m, and Devices and Consumer $63,712m and $18,872m. Within that restatement GitHub cloud and Security Copilot move out of Azure into Microsoft 365 commercial cloud, healthcare and life sciences cloud moves into a new Industry solutions line, and LinkedIn is dismantled as a standalone line.

4. Business Model and Moat

How it makes money. Microsoft sells the same customers three things at once: a per-seat subscription to productivity software, consumption-based cloud infrastructure, and increasingly a per-seat AI add-on layered on top of both. In FY2026 that produced $267,143m of service and other revenue against just $64,696m of product revenue — the business is now overwhelmingly recurring. Microsoft Cloud revenue was $214.4bn, up 27%. The unearned-revenue and remaining-performance-obligation lines show how far forward the cash is contracted: $678bn of commercial backlog with a weighted-average duration of about 2.3 years, of which roughly 30% is expected to be recognised in the next twelve months.

Why customers do not leave. The moat is contractual and operational rather than technological. Enterprise agreements bundle identity, device management, productivity, security and now agents; unpicking one component means unpicking the others. Copilot deepens that by attaching to data already inside Microsoft 365, which is why paid seats went from just over 20 million in April 2026 to more than 30 million three months later. On the infrastructure side the constraint on growth is not demand but capacity — the FY2026 10-K states plainly that Microsoft has experienced supply constraints across semiconductors, networking equipment, power systems and cooling, and Nadella has publicly described rationing compute between Azure customers, internal research and Copilot.

What has changed structurally. Microsoft has stopped being a capital-light software company. Additions to property and equipment went from $28,107m in FY2023 to $115,948m in FY2026, and contractual obligations at 30 June 2026 totalled $743.8bn, of which $443.5bn is operating and finance leases including imputed interest, $194.1bn purchase commitments and $34.6bn construction commitments. These are obligations that do not flex if AI demand disappoints.

Diversifying the model supply. OpenAI remains the frontier partner, but on 18 November 2025 Microsoft committed up to $5bn to Anthropic alongside a $30bn Anthropic commitment to purchase Azure capacity, Anthropic's Claude models reached general availability in Microsoft Foundry in July 2026, and Mustafa Suleyman unveiled seven in-house MAI models at Build 2026. The strategy is now explicitly multi-model.

5. Financial Health

All figures are taken from Microsoft's quarterly earnings releases, the FY2026 Form 10-K filed 29 July 2026, and prior-year 10-K filings. Microsoft's fiscal year ends on 30 June, so FY2026 covers July 2025 to June 2026.

† Microsoft published no non-GAAP EPS for FY2024; GAAP is repeated for completeness. ‡ FY2025 was reported GAAP-only at the time; the figure shown is Microsoft's own retrospective restatement onto the current OpenAI-adjusted basis, disclosed in the FY2026 release. The adjusted basis is not consistent across the table: FY2022 excludes a $3,291m tax benefit on the transfer of intangible properties from Puerto Rico, FY2023 excludes the January 2023 restructuring charge of $1,171m to operating income, and FY2025 and FY2026 exclude only the impact of investments in OpenAI. The long-term debt column is the noncurrent balance-sheet line; a current portion sits alongside it at $2,749m, $5,247m, $2,249m, $2,999m and $9,227m respectively, giving total debt of $40,294m at 30 June 2026.

The FY2026 adjusted figure is lower than GAAP rather than higher, which is unusual and important. OpenAI-related results were a net gain of $4,963m or $0.67 per share in FY2026, driven mainly by the dilution gain on the October 2025 OpenAI recapitalisation, so the adjustment removes profit rather than adding it back. The same line was a $3,620m loss in FY2025, which is why the restated FY2025 adjusted EPS of $14.13 sits above GAAP.

The gap between the two EPS columns is entirely the OpenAI equity-method and dilution line. It added $1.02 per share in Q2 FY2026, removed $0.41 in Q1 FY2026, was immaterial in Q3 FY2026 at a $14m loss, and added $0.07 in Q4 FY2026. In Q2 FY2026 net income of $38,458m actually exceeded operating income of $38,275m as a result. Q4 FY2026 also contained a net benefit of $0.27 per share against April guidance from three discrete items: a $3.2bn gain on the Anthropic investment and lower-than-expected voluntary retirement programme expense, partly offset by severance and undisclosed impairment charges in XBOX.

Cash flow and balance sheet, FY2026: net cash from operations $182,935m against $136,162m in FY2025; additions to property and equipment $115,948m against $64,551m; right-of-use assets obtained in exchange for finance lease liabilities $24,608m, giving total capital investment of $140,556m. The cash-flow add-back line "depreciation, amortization, and other" was $38,534m, within which the 10-K states depreciation expense alone was $34.3bn. Free cash flow, being operating cash flow less additions to property and equipment, was $66,987m against $71,559m in FY2025. At 30 June 2026 cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments were $76,843m, down from $94,565m; property and equipment net was $313,076m, up from $204,966m; total assets $758,376m; total stockholders' equity $442,387m. Microsoft raised no debt in FY2026 and repaid $3,000m.

Guidance issued 29 July 2026 for Q1 FY2027: total revenue of $89.85–90.95bn, cost of goods sold $29.6–29.8bn, operating expenses $16.8–16.9bn, an effective tax rate of approximately 20%, operating margin relatively flat year on year, and capital expenditure of over $50bn including the effect of the useful-life change. For the full year Microsoft guided total capital expenditure and finance leases of approximately $175bn. On 2 September 2026 the Q1 outlook was restated onto the new two-segment basis at Agents and Infra $75.15–75.75bn and Devices and Consumer $14.7–15.2bn, with Azure re-guided to 44–45% constant-currency growth on the restated Azure definition. Total company revenue, costs, margin, tax rate and capital expenditure guidance were unchanged.

6. Valuation Metrics

Raw metrics, September 2026. Not opinions on whether the stock is cheap or expensive.

Compare these against live price action on the ChartsView Live Charts page.

7. What Are They Building

The Fairwater AI estate. Fairwater 1 at Mount Pleasant and Kenosha, Wisconsin spans 315 acres and 1.2 million square feet across three buildings, houses hundreds of thousands of NVIDIA GB200 and GB300 GPUs in a single unified cluster, and is described by Microsoft as the world's most powerful AI data centre. Wisconsin investment across the first two campuses totals $7.3bn, with phase one peak power near 400MW and full build-out approaching 900MW. Reporting indicates the site went online in April 2026 around six weeks ahead of schedule and was declared fully operational on 23 June 2026. Fairwater 2 in Atlanta is connected to the Wisconsin site over a dedicated AI network to form what Microsoft calls an "AI superfactory", allowing sites in different states to train models jointly.

In-house silicon. Maia 200, Microsoft's second-generation AI inference accelerator, was released in January 2026, has entered mass production and now helps run Microsoft 365 Copilot. Maia 300 is reported to be unveiled in September 2026, with Microsoft negotiating TSMC capacity for upwards of 300,000 units for delivery in 2027 and an eventual ambition beyond one million. The strategic aim is to raise internal Maia usage and reduce dependence on a single GPU supplier. No fresh 2026 disclosure on the Cobalt CPU line was found.

Agents as a product category. At Build 2026 in early June, Agent 365 reached general availability including secure agent execution environments via Windows 365 for Agents; Fabric IQ was integrated with Agent 365 as a first-party tool and extended into Microsoft 365 Copilot; and one-click publishing of agents to Teams and Microsoft 365 Copilot went generally available. In Microsoft Foundry, Frontier Tuning was demonstrated for fine-tuning frontier models and ontologies became directly available as knowledge sources for custom and built-in agents. Microsoft 365 Copilot passed 30 million paid seats and GitHub Copilot 50 million users during the June quarter.

Its own models. Mustafa Suleyman used the Build 2026 keynote to unveil seven new MAI models spanning sizes and modalities, with named releases including MAI-Thinking-1, MAI-Code-1, MAI-Image-2.5 and MAI-Voice-2, plus a cost-efficient coding model introduced during the fourth quarter. This is Microsoft's explicit hedge against single-supplier model dependence, alongside the Anthropic partnership announced on 18 November 2025 under which NVIDIA committed up to $10bn and Microsoft up to $5bn to Anthropic, Anthropic committed to purchase $30bn of Azure capacity, and Claude models reached general availability in Microsoft Foundry in July 2026.

Quantum and post-quantum security. The topological programme continues around the Majorana 1 processor and 4D geometric error-correction codes, with the current chip reported at 12 qubits. The more consequential 2026 development is defensive: at the end of June 2026 Microsoft accelerated its Quantum Safe Program, bringing forward to 2029 the target for transitioning critical products and services to post-quantum cryptography, citing a shifted risk horizon. The Secure Future Initiative progress report published on 10 July 2026 folded post-quantum requirements into its scope alongside multifactor authentication adoption, access governance and vulnerability remediation.

Gaming, in the other direction. XBOX revenue fell from $23,455m in FY2025 to $21,790m in FY2026 and content and services fell 10% in Q4. On 6 July 2026 the Xbox division lost roughly a fifth of its staff and four studios were announced for spin-out; Game Pass prices were cut during the quarter and undisclosed impairment charges were taken. Q1 FY2027 guidance is for content and services to decline mid-single digits and hardware to decline again.

8. Competitive Landscape

The uncomfortable comparison is Alphabet. Azure grew 43% in the June quarter from a larger base, but Google Cloud grew 82% from a smaller one and Alphabet's market capitalisation has moved above Microsoft's. Microsoft shares were down roughly 19% year to date as at the 29 July close while the S&P 500 was up around 7%, before the results reversed a large part of that in a single session. Follow the earnings dates on the ChartsView Economic Calendar.

9. Insider Activity

Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella sold shares on 1 September 2026 under a Rule 10b5-1 trading plan, the largest disclosed executive disposal of the year. Every 2026 transaction identified below is a disposal; no open-market insider purchases were found. Note that the 31 August 2026 activity across the senior team was the annual equity grant and associated tax withholding at $513.53 per share, not open-market selling — Nadella acquired 178,622 shares with 70,466 withheld for tax, Amy Hood acquired 31,260 with 18,739 withheld, Bradford Smith acquired 27,688 with 17,036 withheld, and Judson Althoff acquired 29,724 with 18,081 withheld.

The May and March disposals were executed near the year's lows around $410, well below the $497 at which the shares now trade. Nadella's September sale is plan-based and is the only 2026 disposal carrying the Rule 10b5-1 affirmation flag.

10. Key Risks

• Capital expenditure and the depreciation drag: additions to property and equipment rose from $28,107m in FY2023 to $115,948m in FY2026, a 4.1-fold increase in three years, and FY2027 capital investment including finance leases is guided to approximately $175bn. Depreciation expense rose from $15.2bn to $34.3bn across two years. Free cash flow fell to $66,987m in FY2026 from $71,559m despite net income rising 31%, and the simultaneous extension of building useful lives from 15 to 25 years flatters future depreciation without improving operations.
• Capacity constraints and inflexible commitments: the FY2026 10-K states Microsoft has experienced and may continue to experience shortages of semiconductors, networking equipment, power systems and cooling equipment, that expanding supply may require multi-year lead times, and that it may only secure supply by paying above prevailing market rates. Q4 capital expenditure explicitly included higher component pricing. Purchase commitments of $194.1bn and construction commitments of $34.6bn do not flex if demand disappoints.
• Customer concentration in OpenAI: OpenAI generated $24.1bn of Microsoft revenue in FY2026, roughly 7.3% of the company, with $6.0bn outstanding in receivables at 30 June 2026, and Microsoft said in January 2026 that around 45% of its then-$625bn commercial backlog was tied to OpenAI. Microsoft has funded $11.9bn of a $13.0bn commitment, holds an equity-method interest of approximately 25% as converted, has given up its right of first refusal on OpenAI compute, and has renegotiated the agreement twice in nine months.
• Earnings quality distorted by investment marks: $6.5bn of FY2026 other income was net gains on the OpenAI investment, primarily a non-cash dilution gain, plus a $3.2bn Anthropic gain in Q4. The same line produced $4.8bn of losses in FY2025 and $1.5bn in FY2024. These marks are non-recurring and can reverse; GAAP EPS of $17.95 is $0.67 above the non-GAAP figure as a result.
• Cloud competition from faster-growing rivals: Google Cloud grew 82% to $24.8bn in the June 2026 quarter with a $514bn backlog and AWS accelerated to 37% on a $169bn run-rate base, while Oracle reported $638bn of remaining performance obligations. Alphabet's market capitalisation now exceeds Microsoft's, and Microsoft shares were down roughly 19% year to date as at 29 July 2026 against a 7% rise in the S&P 500.
• Antitrust and regulatory action on three continents: the UK Competition and Markets Authority opened a Strategic Market Status investigation into Microsoft's business software ecosystem on 14 May 2026 with a decision due by February 2027; the European Commission said on 25 June 2026 that Azure should preliminarily be treated as a Digital Markets Act gatekeeper, with a decision required by November 2026 and six months to comply thereafter; and the US Federal Trade Commission's investigation into cloud and productivity licensing practices and the OpenAI relationship continues into 2026.
• Cybersecurity as an existential rather than merely costly risk: Microsoft lists cyberattacks and security vulnerabilities first among its non-competition risk factors, noting they could lead to reduced revenue, increased costs, liability claims and reputational harm. The Secure Future Initiative exists because of prior state-actor breaches, and the pull-forward of the post-quantum cryptography deadline to 2029 is an admission that the cryptographic threat model is moving faster than planned.
• Gaming contraction three years after Activision Blizzard: More Personal Computing revenue fell 1.1% in FY2026 and 4% in Q4, XBOX revenue fell from $23,455m to $21,790m, and content and services fell 10% in the quarter. Microsoft cut roughly a fifth of Xbox staff on 6 July 2026, announced four studio spin-outs, cut Game Pass prices, and took undisclosed impairment charges. Q1 FY2027 guidance is for further declines in both content and hardware.
• Currency and the PC cycle: Microsoft flagged a $4,445m favourable currency impact on FY2026 revenue and $2,896m on operating income, meaning roughly two points of reported revenue growth was foreign exchange that will not repeat if the dollar strengthens. Windows OEM and devices fell 7% in Q4 FY2026 and is guided to decline in the low twenties in Q1 FY2027, far steeper than the wider PC market.

11. Recent Developments

• 10 Mar 2026 — Quarterly dividend of $0.91 per share declared. The third of four declarations at that rate during FY2026, which totalled $3.64 per share and $27.0bn in aggregate.
• 24 Apr 2026 — First-ever voluntary retirement programme announced. Buyouts were offered to roughly 8,750 US employees, about 7% of the domestic workforce, open to senior director level and below under a "Rule of 70" formula of age plus years of service. Reporting indicates about 30% of those eligible accepted; lower-than-expected expense later helped Q4 earnings.
• 29 Apr 2026 — Q3 FY2026 results. Revenue $82,886m up 18%, operating income $38,398m up 20%, GAAP diluted EPS $4.27 up 23%, Intelligent Cloud $34,681m up 30% and Azure up 40%. Guidance issued that day was received as light and the shares fell.
• 14 May 2026 — UK Competition and Markets Authority opened a Strategic Market Status investigation. The nine-month probe covers Microsoft's business software ecosystem, focusing on licensing practices and AI interoperability, with a designation decision due by February 2027. Carmine Di Sibio's appointment to the Board was announced the same day, joining the Audit and Compensation Committees.
• 02 Jun 2026 — Reid Hoffman confirmed he will not stand for re-election. After nine years as a director he serves until the 2026 annual shareholder meeting; the departure is not the result of any disagreement with management.
• 10 Jun 2026 — Quarterly dividend of $0.91 declared, record date 20 August 2026, payable 10 September 2026. The shares have already traded ex-dividend, so that payment is locked in.
• 25 Jun 2026 — European Commission said AWS and Azure should preliminarily be treated as Digital Markets Act gatekeepers. A decision is required by November 2026, with six months to comply thereafter if designated.
• 06 Jul 2026 — 4,800 jobs cut, about 2.1% of the workforce. The reduction spanned sales, consulting and gaming, with the Xbox division losing roughly one-fifth of its staff and four gaming studios announced for spin-out. Xbox chief executive Asha Sharma announced the cuts.
• 29 Jul 2026 — Q4 FY2026 and full-year results, and the FY2026 Form 10-K filed the same day. Q4 revenue $90,007m up 18% against consensus of $87.62bn, GAAP diluted EPS $4.81 against $4.24 expected, Azure up 43%, Microsoft Cloud $59.3bn up 27%, and commercial remaining performance obligation $678bn up 84%. FY2027 capital expenditure plus finance leases was guided to approximately $175bn and building useful lives extended from 15 to 25 years.
• 30 Jul 2026 — Shares posted their biggest one-day gain since 2008, adding roughly $480bn of market value. The move followed a year-to-date decline of roughly 19% into the print.
• 10 Aug 2026 — Reported that Microsoft will unveil the Maia 300 AI accelerator in September 2026. Microsoft is said to be negotiating TSMC capacity for upwards of 300,000 units for 2027 delivery.
• 01 Sep 2026 — Satya Nadella sold 86,525 shares for approximately $43.4m under a Rule 10b5-1 plan. Prices ranged from $498.24 to $505.20 across eight weighted-average bands.
• 02 Sep 2026 — Microsoft announced a move to two reportable segments from FY2027. Agents and Infra, and Devices and Consumer, replace the current three, with restated FY2025 and FY2026 quarterly history and a mechanically adjusted Q1 FY2027 outlook. Total company guidance was unchanged.

Two absences are worth noting. Microsoft issued no debt at all in FY2026 — proceeds from issuance of debt were nil against $3,000m of repayments — and no new buyback authorisation was announced, with $40.6bn remaining at 30 June 2026 of the $60bn programme authorised in September 2024. Readers comparing notes can do so on the ChartsView Forum.

12. Key Dates

• 10 Sep 2026 — Quarterly dividend of $0.91 per share paid, to holders of record on 20 August 2026. Declared 10 June 2026.
• Expected September 2026 — Maia 300 AI accelerator unveiling, reported on 10 August 2026 with no confirmed date.
• Expected September 2026 — Declaration of the next quarterly dividend, together with the annual increase. Microsoft has raised the quarterly rate every September for more than a decade; the last six increases were 9.8%, 10.7%, 9.7%, 10.3%, 10.7% and 9.6%, and the September 2025 declaration took the rate from $0.83 to $0.91. No declaration had been made as at 3 September 2026.
• Expected October 2026 — Q1 FY2027 results, for the quarter ending 30 September 2026, and the first quarter reported on the new two-segment basis. Calendars most commonly cite 27 October 2026 after market close, with one carrying 28 October; Microsoft has not posted an official confirmation.
• Expected November 2026 — European Commission decision deadline on whether Azure is designated a Digital Markets Act gatekeeper, following the preliminary view of 25 June 2026. Designation would trigger a six-month compliance period.
• 17 Nov 2026 — Microsoft Ignite 2026 opens at the Moscone Center, San Francisco, running to 20 November.
• 08 Dec 2026 — 2026 Annual Shareholders Meeting, held virtually at 8:30am Pacific Time. Reid Hoffman's board term ends at this meeting.
• Expected February 2027 — UK Competition and Markets Authority decision on Strategic Market Status for Microsoft's business software ecosystem, nine months from the 14 May 2026 opening.
• Expected May 2027 — Microsoft Build 2027 at the Seattle Convention Center. Dates of 18 to 20 May 2027 are circulating but have not been officially announced.

The exact dollar amount of the XBOX impairment taken in Q4 FY2026 has not been disclosed, and the precise terms of the April 2026 OpenAI amendment are confirmed to exist by the Form 10-K but not detailed in it. Both remain outstanding disclosure items.

Disclaimer: This research is produced by ChartsView for educational and informational purposes only. It does not constitute financial advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. All information is sourced from publicly available company filings, press releases, and official data. ChartsView does not use analyst opinions or third-party ratings. Always conduct your own due diligence and consider your personal financial situation before making investment decisions. Past performance is not indicative of future results.

See also: Technical analysis on Alphabet · Alphabet company tracker

Last Updated: 2 September 2026

Alphabet is the holding company for Google, and in the twelve months to 30 June 2026 it produced $445.9bn of revenue, roughly two-thirds of it from advertising. The FY2025 accounts were the first to pass $400bn. The story in 2026, however, is not the advertising engine — it is what Alphabet is doing with the cash that engine throws off. Capital expenditure guidance for 2026 has been raised twice since February, from $175–185bn to $195–205bn, and in the June 2026 quarter the company reported its first negative free cash flow quarter in its history as a public company. Alongside that, Google Cloud grew 82% year on year and closed the quarter with a $513.9bn revenue backlog. This report sets out what the filings say, without ratings or price targets.

1. Company Snapshot

Cross-reference: this report also links to the ChartsView Live Charts tool and the Economic Calendar.

2. The Bull and Bear Case

Bull Case

• Cloud is now a genuine second engine: Google Cloud revenue rose 82% year on year to $24,768m in Q2 2026, and segment operating income rose from $2,826m to $8,814m, lifting the margin from 20.7% to 35.6%. Cloud is 20.7% of group revenue, against 14.6% for the whole of FY2025.
• The backlog quantifies the demand: remaining performance obligations stood at $519.5bn at 30 June 2026, of which $513.9bn sits in Google Cloud, having nearly doubled from over $460bn at the end of Q1 2026. Management expects a little over half of it to convert to revenue within 24 months.
• Full-stack ownership is rare: Alphabet owns the model, the accelerator, the data centre and the consumer distribution surface. The seventh-generation Ironwood TPU became generally available at Google Cloud Next in April 2026, and two eighth-generation parts — TPU 8t and TPU 8i, on a 2nm process — were previewed for late 2027. From Q2 2026 the company describes Cloud product revenue as coming primarily from the sale of TPU systems, a new disclosure.
• The distribution deals survived the antitrust remedy: the final judgment entered on 5 December 2025 left Chrome and Android with Alphabet and allowed payments to distribution partners to continue, subject to non-exclusivity, an annual re-negotiation limit and a ban on tying. The largest structural threat to the business model did not materialise.
• The advertising base is still compounding: Google Search and other revenue rose 17% in Q2 2026 to $63,271m, and Google Services operating income was $39,544m. The Gemini app reached 950 million monthly active users, from 750 million at the end of 2025, giving Alphabet a consumer distribution surface for AI that no rival model developer has.

Bear Case

• Capital intensity has stepped up violently: FY2026 capex guidance of $195–205bn is roughly 2.2 times the $91,447m spent in FY2025, and has been raised twice in five months. H1 2026 capex was already $80,598m against $39,643m a year earlier.
• Free cash flow turned negative: Q2 2026 operating cash flow of $39,069m was exceeded by $44,924m of capex, producing negative free cash flow of $5,855m for the quarter. Trailing twelve-month free cash flow of $53,273m is below the $73,266m of FY2025 despite far higher revenue.
• Reported earnings are flattered by non-operating gains: Q2 2026 diluted EPS of $9.11 includes roughly $6.26 per share from a $99.0bn net gain on equity securities, most of it unrealised. Q1 2026 included a further $2.35 per share from a $36.9bn gain. On an underlying basis Q2 2026 EPS is closer to $2.85, and the headline growth rate is not a trading result.
• The balance sheet is being levered to fund the build: long-term debt rose from $10,883m at the end of FY2024 to $46,547m at the end of FY2025 and $98,165m at 30 June 2026. Alphabet issued $31.1bn of notes in Q1 2026, $49.6bn of equity and mandatory convertible preferred in June 2026 — its first ever preferred issue — and closed a further $25bn bond in August 2026. Buybacks stopped entirely in H1 2026 after $28.3bn in H1 2025.
• The regulatory bill keeps arriving: the EU fined Alphabet €2.95bn on ad tech in September 2025, the Court of Justice made the €4.125bn Android fine final on 2 July 2026, and a further €890m Digital Markets Act fine landed on 23 July 2026 with a 60-day compliance deadline and exposure to periodic penalties of up to 5% of average daily worldwide turnover. The US ad-tech remedies decision has not yet issued.

3. Revenue Segments

Alphabet reports three segments — Google Services, Google Cloud and Other Bets — and discloses revenue lines within Google Services. The table below uses FY2025, the last complete year.

By geography in Q2 2026: United States $60,846m (up 32%), EMEA $32,501m (up 15%), Asia-Pacific $19,317m (up 17%) and Other Americas $7,026m (up 23%). Total traffic acquisition cost was $16,179m in the quarter, up 10%.

4. Business Model and Moat

How it makes money. Roughly 68% of Q2 2026 revenue is advertising, and the single largest line is Google Search and other at 52.8% of group revenue. Advertisers bid in real-time auctions for placement against user intent; Alphabet takes the auction proceeds and pays a portion away as traffic acquisition cost to the partners — Apple, Samsung, Android original equipment manufacturers and Mozilla among them — who deliver the query. The remainder of revenue comes from consumption-based cloud contracts, recurring consumer subscriptions, Play store take rates and hardware.

Where the defensibility sits. The search franchise is self-reinforcing: more queries produce better ranking data, which produces better results, which attracts more queries and therefore more advertiser demand. The US District Court found in August 2024 that Alphabet holds monopolies in general search services and general search text advertising — a finding Alphabet is appealing, but one that describes the commercial position accurately.

Vertical integration is the newer part of the story. Alphabet is the only hyperscaler that designs its own AI accelerator, trains its own frontier model on it, runs it in its own data centres over its own subsea network, and then puts it in front of consumers through Android, Chrome, Search, YouTube and Gmail. Anthropic expanded its commitment to Google Cloud and TPUs to up to one million chips in April 2026, and subsequently to multiple gigawatts of next-generation capacity with Google and Broadcom — an arrangement that is simultaneously a customer contract and a validation of the silicon.

Distribution deals, post-remedy. Judge Mehta's remedies opinion of 2 September 2025, entered as a final judgment on 5 December 2025, permits Alphabet to keep paying Apple for Safari default placement. The restrictions are that the agreement cannot be exclusive, Alphabet cannot prevent Apple promoting rival search or assistant products, it cannot tie Search placement to Gemini placement, and revenue share cannot be conditioned on default status for more than one year at a time. The arrangement survives, but it is now non-exclusive and re-negotiable annually, and whether distribution payments should have been banned outright is the central question in the Department of Justice cross-appeal.

5. Financial Health

All figures below are taken from Alphabet's own earnings releases, 10-K and 10-Q filings, and from its XBRL company facts on SEC EDGAR. Alphabet publishes no adjusted or non-GAAP earnings per share; its only non-GAAP measures are free cash flow and constant-currency revenue.

† Alphabet does not report an adjusted earnings per share figure. The GAAP number is repeated so the column is not left blank. ‡ The long-term debt column is the balance-sheet long-term debt line as reported in each year's annual filing; the FY2024 and FY2025 figures tie exactly to the XBRL tag LongTermDebtNoncurrent, while earlier years as originally presented included finance-lease obligations within that line. Long-term debt had risen further to $98,165m at 30 June 2026, with a further $1,999m classified as current.

The two 2026 quarters need reading with care. Q2 2026 diluted EPS of $9.11 includes approximately $6.26 per share from a $99.0bn net gain on equity securities, the great majority of it unrealised; Q1 2026 included a further $2.35 per share from a $36.9bn gain. Stripping those out, underlying earnings per share were closer to $2.85 in Q2 2026 and $2.76 in Q1 2026. Operating income tells a cleaner story: $40,770m in Q2 2026 against $31,271m a year earlier, a 30% increase on a 34% operating margin. Two prior-period distortions are also worth noting — Q3 2025 absorbed a $3.5bn European Commission charge, and Q4 2025 a $2.1bn Waymo employee compensation charge.

On cash: FY2025 operating cash flow was $164,713m against $91,447m of capital expenditure, giving free cash flow of $73,266m. For the trailing twelve months to 30 June 2026, operating cash flow was $185,675m and capital expenditure $132,402m, giving free cash flow of $53,273m. Total equity stood at $640,480m at 30 June 2026, on total assets of $921,983m. Purchase commitments and other contractual obligations were disclosed at $811.0bn, of which $200.7bn is short-term — a figure that quantifies how much infrastructure Alphabet has already committed to buy.

6. Valuation Metrics

Raw metrics, September 2026. Not opinions on whether the stock is cheap or expensive.

7. What Are They Building

Silicon. Ironwood, the seventh-generation Tensor Processing Unit, became generally available to Cloud customers at Google Cloud Next in April 2026, positioned as Google's first TPU designed for the inference era at 4.6 petaFLOPS per chip and 42.5 exaFLOPS in a 9,216-chip superpod. At the same event Google previewed its eighth generation and, for the first time, split training from inference: TPU 8t, designed with Broadcom for training, and TPU 8i, designed with MediaTek for inference, both on a TSMC 2nm process and targeted at late 2027.

Models. The Gemini 3.5 family launched at Google I/O on 19 May 2026. A further release on 21 July 2026 added three models including Gemini 3.5 Flash Cyber, the only one of the three named in Alphabet's own quarterly release. August brought Gemini 3.5 Transcribe on 26 August and Gemini Omni 1.1 Flash on 27 August, and on 31 August 2026 Gemini 3.7 Flash shipped paired with Google Antigravity for multi-agent engineering work. On 1 September 2026 Alphabet added agentic video understanding to Gemini. The naming across the 3.5 to 3.7 tiers is inconsistent in third-party coverage; the release cadence is not.

Usage. Management disclosed 22 billion API tokens per minute in Q2 2026, up from more than 16 billion in Q1, 950 million monthly active users of the Gemini app, and around 90% of the Fortune 100 using Gemini Enterprise. YouTube carried 1.7 billion unique viewers of FIFA World Cup 2026 content.

Power. On 1 September 2026 Fervo Energy and Google signed a 396 MW enhanced-geothermal power purchase agreement at Cape Station, Utah — the largest such agreement in the world — coming online in 2028, with a Google option to expand by roughly 600 MW to nearly 1 GW by June 2030 and a potential Utah data centre attached to it. Securing firm clean power is now a gating constraint on the capex programme, not a public-relations exercise.

Waymo. The autonomous-driving unit closed a $16bn round at a $126bn valuation announced in February 2026, majority funded by Alphabet. It passed 500,000 fully autonomous rides a week in Q1 2026, announced four further US cities on 8 July 2026, and is targeting one million weekly rides by the end of 2026, with Tokyo and London as first international markets. Waymo is the substance of the Other Bets segment and the reason for its $7,515m FY2025 operating loss.

8. Competitive Position

On Synergy Research Group's Q2 2026 numbers, total enterprise cloud infrastructure spending reached $143bn in the quarter, growing 43% year on year — the fastest rate in eight years. Amazon Web Services held 28%, Microsoft 20% and Google Cloud 15%, with Google having gained a point sequentially from 14% in Q1 2026. The fastest-growing providers outside the big three were CoreWeave, OpenAI, Oracle, Crusoe, Nebius, Anthropic and Nscale — several of which are also Alphabet customers or partners. Separately, OpenAI's annualised revenue run rate passed $40bn by August 2026, up from roughly $20bn at the end of 2025; it is the principal competitive threat to search query volume and is not captured in the cloud share table.

9. Insider Activity

Chief Executive Sundar Pichai's most recent open-market disposal on the SEC record is 18 March 2026; since then his only Form 4 activity has been routine share-unit vesting and the mandatory share withholding that accompanies it. Across Alphabet as a whole there have been no open-market purchases by any insider in 2026. Every discretionary disposal found is executed under a Rule 10b5-1 plan, and the dominant pattern in the filings is unit vesting plus tax withholding rather than a trading decision.

One trap worth naming: Form 4 filings appearing under Alphabet's SEC identifier from GV 2019 GP, L.L.C. — Google Ventures — are disposals of portfolio-company stock in which Alphabet is the reporting owner, not the issuer. The sub-$20 prices on those filings distinguish them immediately from genuine GOOGL transactions.

10. Key Risks

• Capital-cycle risk: $195–205bn of 2026 capex, twice revised upward, creates a fixed depreciation and operating-cost burden that persists whether or not AI demand sustains. Management explicitly signalled continued margin pressure on the Q2 2026 call. Free cash flow has already turned negative for a quarter.
• Antitrust remedies not yet settled: the search case is on appeal at the D.C. Circuit, with the Department of Justice cross-appealing to have distribution payments banned outright. A ruling against Alphabet on that point would remove the mechanism by which it secures default placement on Apple devices — a payment estimated at around $20bn a year.
• Ad-tech remedies decision is an undated binary: Judge Brinkema found in April 2025 that Alphabet unlawfully monopolised the publisher ad server and ad exchange markets and unlawfully tied them. Closing arguments were heard on 21 November 2025 and no final remedies order has issued. The Department of Justice sought divestiture of AdX. The timing is unknown and the outcome could be structural.
• Escalating European enforcement: the €4.125bn Android fine became final on 2 July 2026, a €2.95bn ad-tech fine from September 2025 is under appeal, and the €890m Digital Markets Act fine of 23 July 2026 carries a compliance deadline around 21 September 2026 with periodic penalties of up to 5% of average daily worldwide turnover for non-compliance.
• Search substitution by conversational AI: OpenAI's revenue run rate passed $40bn by August 2026. Query volume migrating from a monetised auction surface to an unmonetised or differently-monetised chat interface is the structural threat to 52.8% of Alphabet's revenue, and Alphabet's own Gemini app is part of that migration.
• Key-person and research attrition: on 5 August 2026 Chief Scientist Jeff Dean left after 27 years to found a startup, and Demis Hassabis moved from Chief Executive of Google DeepMind to Chair of the unit and Chief Scientist of Alphabet. The shares fell 4–5% in a session. Frontier AI research is unusually person-dependent.
• Earnings quality and volatility: $135.9bn of largely unrealised equity-securities gains across the two 2026 quarters flow straight through the income statement. These reverse as readily as they arise, and they make reported earnings and any multiple derived from them unreliable as a run rate.
• Governance and accounting turnover: the Principal Accounting Officer changed twice in 2026 — Amie Thuener O'Toole resigned effective 9 April 2026 and Marsida Saraci was appointed on 5 June 2026 — during a period of unprecedented balance-sheet activity including a first-ever preferred issuance and a $40bn at-the-market equity programme.

11. Recent Developments

• 19 May 2026 — Gemini 3.5 launched at Google I/O. Alphabet unveiled the Gemini 3.5 family, characterised as frontier intelligence with agentic action, with a two-million-token context window and a Deep Think reasoning layer.
• 05 Jun 2026 — Annual meeting and a new Chief Accounting Officer. Shareholders approved a 200 million Class C share increase to the 2021 Stock Plan reserve, and Marsida Saraci, at Alphabet since 2011, was appointed VP, Controller and Principal Accounting Officer.
• 30 Jun 2026 — First-ever preferred issuance completed. Alphabet raised aggregate net proceeds of $49.6bn from a combined Class A and Class C stock offering plus 6.25% mandatory convertible preferred stock, and put in place an at-the-market programme for up to a further $40.0bn.
• 02 Jul 2026 — Android appeal lost definitively. The EU Court of Justice dismissed Alphabet's challenge and confirmed the €4.125bn Android abuse-of-dominance fine. There is no further avenue of appeal.
• 22 Jul 2026 — Q2 2026 results: revenue beat, capex shock. Revenue of $119.8bn was up 24% and Google Cloud grew 82% to $24.8bn on a $514bn backlog, but 2026 capex guidance was lifted to $195–205bn, free cash flow turned negative at minus $5.9bn for the quarter, and the shares fell.
• 23 Jul 2026 — Largest-ever Digital Markets Act fine. The European Commission fined Alphabet €890m, split €460m for search self-preferencing and €430m for Play Store anti-steering, with a 60-day window to end the infringements.
• 05 Aug 2026 — AI leadership shake-up. Chief Scientist Jeff Dean departed after 27 years to found Discovery Loop, with Alphabet investing; Demis Hassabis became Chair of Google DeepMind and Chief Scientist of Alphabet; Koray Kavukcuoglu became SVP reporting directly to Sundar Pichai. The shares fell 4–5%.
• 10 Aug 2026 — $25bn bond offering closed. Alphabet's largest single debt deal, spanning floating-rate notes due 2028 to 6.500% notes due 2066, taking long-term debt to $98.2bn at the half year.
• 31 Aug 2026 — Gemini 3.7 Flash shipped with Google Antigravity. Paired for multi-agent mathematics and engineering work, closing a five-day run that also delivered Gemini 3.5 Transcribe on 26 August and Gemini Omni 1.1 Flash on 27 August.
• 01 Sep 2026 — World's largest enhanced-geothermal power agreement signed. Fervo Energy and Google announced a 396 MW power purchase agreement at Cape Station, Utah, online in 2028, with an option to expand to nearly 1 GW by June 2030. Alphabet also launched agentic video understanding in Gemini the same day.

12. Key Dates to Watch

• 04 Sep 2026 — ex-dividend date for the $0.22 quarterly common dividend declared on 22 July 2026
• 07 Sep 2026 — record date for that dividend
• 14 Sep 2026 — payment date for the $0.22 quarterly common dividend
• 21 Sep 2026 — approximate expiry of the 60-day Digital Markets Act compliance window following the European Commission's 23 July 2026 decision, after which periodic penalty payments of up to 5% of average daily worldwide turnover become available to the Commission
• 27 Oct 2026 — Q3 2026 results, after the close. Third-party earnings calendars list this as confirmed; Alphabet's own investor events page could not be verified directly. A dividend declaration normally accompanies the release.
• Expected Nov 2026 — next quarterly instalment on the Series A and Series B mandatory convertible preferred stock, following the $12.15 per share paid on 15 August 2026
• TBD — final remedies order in the Department of Justice ad-tech case before Judge Brinkema in the Eastern District of Virginia. Closing arguments were heard on 21 November 2025 and no decision has issued as at 2 September 2026.
• Expected Feb 2027 — Q4 and FY2026 results, and the FY2026 Form 10-K, on the pattern of the 4 February 2026 release
• Expected Jun 2027 — 2027 annual meeting of shareholders, on the pattern of the 5 June 2026 meeting

Two further items have no fixed date. Oral argument before the D.C. Circuit in the search-monopoly appeal and the Department of Justice cross-appeal was expected in late 2026 or early 2027, with briefing still under way in late August 2026. Alphabet has issued no capital expenditure guidance for 2027; the first indication is likely to come with the Q4 2026 release. Readers tracking the schedule may find the ChartsView Economic Calendar useful, and discussion continues on the ChartsView Forum.

Disclaimer: This research is produced by ChartsView for educational and informational purposes only. It does not constitute financial advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. All information is sourced from publicly available company filings, press releases, and official data. ChartsView does not use analyst opinions or third-party ratings. Always conduct your own due diligence and consider your personal financial situation before making investment decisions. Past performance is not indicative of future results.