Microsoft đối mặt thách thức trong cuộc đua AI, cổ phiếu giảm 20%

It's hard to find AI optimists these days. AI-adjacent stocks have taken a battering in recent months, with Oracle and Microsoft particularly hard hit. Microsoft's stock is down over 20% from last summer's highs, as investors increasingly worry that the firm has over-extended and misjudged the opportunities therein. Wider questions remain about the future viability of the tech. Cheaper Chinese models are pressuring the big U.S. hyper-scalers to find new efficiencies and strategies, as firms like OpenAI, SpaceX, Palantir, and Anthropic struggle to justify their more optimistic valuations. Some of the more dire warnings suggest the rife circular investments and financing could implode, threatening not only the associated companies, but potentially the entire global economy. Recently, I caught up with Ed Zitron, head of EZPR and the Better Offline Podcast , who has become a prominent journalistic voice in AI analysis. Zitron's industry-leading tech newsletter Where's Your Ed At has become a primary source for those navigating the complex (and shady?) financial deals these companies are weaving, cutting through the industry hype with an oft-times scathing dose of reality. I asked Zitron specifically about Microsoft's bets in this space, as the hype train objectively begins to lose steam. Microsoft occupies an odd space in the "AI race," if you can still call it that at this point. Why do you think Wall Street and the stock market are rewarding Google but punishing Microsoft this year? Ed Zitron leads EZPR, and publishes an industry-leading tech newsletter Where's Your Ed At . (Image credit: Ed Zitron, EZPR) "It’s because Microsoft is uniquely awful at having to prove its worth outside of financials, and is run by some of the most decrepit, disconnected, and directionless leadership I’ve seen in any company I’ve ever monitored. Whenever this company has to beguile investors, it can usually just throw up big money numbers and raise the price on Microsoft Office. This time it made the mistake of actually spending cash — and man, did AI save its ass from humiliation by distracting from its Activision-Blizzard acquisition! — on something, and doing so in the loudest way possible, because saying “AI” and spending lots of money on AI was all it took to make people buy your stock. Sadly, $200 billion or more in capex in, Satya Nadella doesn’t really have a compelling answer as to where this money is going. He mentioned on their last earnings that they’d hit a $37 billion run rate for AI - around $3 billion a month in revenue, with the vast majority of that being OpenAI’s compute spend — and it didn’t get anybody hot and heavy, so the stock has kept tanking." If I surveyed 100 people about what they’d change about Microsoft I bet at least 30% of them would say “remove Copilot.” Ed Zitron "This is also because Azure has been a much bigger business than Google Cloud. Sundar Pichai is also better at the financial tricks than Satya Nadella, and worked out a way to make circular financing more conspicuous, selling Anthropic its own chips and then getting those chips put in Google data centers so that it can get the revenue from Anthropic, who it funds, buying compute. That huge bump in remaining performance obligations was, to be clear, mostly from circular financing. I have no idea why Satya didn’t do this with OpenAI’s spend, and I have to wonder if he doesn’t start being really blunt about how much it’s boosting Azure revenue, even though that’ll probably work to his detriment. Anyway, Google Cloud is a younger and smaller business and thus much easier to show explosive growth in. Satya is also not very good at marketing." Microsoft's stock price has taken a battering over the past year, as investors fret about the amount of money being spent on AI data centers. (Image credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto) Do you think Microsoft will realistically see any long-term return on investment from its data center build out? Have they completely…