Like many big tech companies, Microsoft is preparing for the worst after announcing plans to lay off 10,000 employees in the upcoming third quarter. As it turns out, the company’s second quarter was a mixed bag: Revenue was $52.7 billion, up 2% from last year but slightly less than the $52.9 billion analysts expected. Profit was also down 12% to $16.4 billion, a trend that could continue throughout the year, Engadget wrote on the subject.

Despite a weakening PC market, Microsoft has enjoyed high cloud services revenue for years, and that appears to be continuing. The company’s intelligent cloud services business was up 18% from last year, reaching $21.5 billion.

Belt-tightening at Microsoft hasn’t stopped the company from potentially investing another $10 billion in ChatGPT creator OpenAI, another sign that AI will play an important role in its future projects. The company plans to add ChatGPT to its Azure OpenAI service soon and reportedly plans to integrate this technology into Bing.

“The surprisingly strong performance of Microsoft’s key Azure cloud business was enough to alleviate concerns over the steeper cloud optimization slowdown, sending the stock higher. Technology investors were relieved to see that the slowdown in Microsoft’s key cloud business wasn’t as bad as feared.”

said Jesse Cohen, senior analyst at Investing.com.

Microsoft’s More Personal Computing division, which includes Windows, Xbox and PC hardware, fell 19% year-over-year to $14.2 billion.

 

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