Microsoft just handed chip investors an early Christmas present, in July. The company’s fiscal Q4 2026 earnings, released on July 29, came in at $90 billion in revenue, an 18% jump year-over-year, and the market’s immediate response was to pile into every stock that touches AI infrastructure.
Micron Technology and SanDisk were among the clearest winners. Both stocks have rallied sharply in 2026 on the back of surging demand for high-bandwidth memory and NAND flash storage, the two types of chips that make large-scale AI workloads physically possible.
Why Microsoft’s quarter moves chip stocks
Azure, Microsoft’s cloud platform, posted 43% growth in the quarter.
Microsoft spent $41 billion on capital expenditures in Q4 alone. The company is on pace to deploy roughly $175 billion into AI infrastructure across all of calendar year 2026.
